EFF comes with extension to block trackers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a browser extension that can block trackers. The extension is called Privacy Badger and it blocks data collection via advertisements and other hidden trackers.

Privacy Badger went through an alpha and beta phase in the past year. The EFF introduced the 1.0 release on Thursday. Privacy Badger can be added to the non-mobile variants of Chrome, Chromium-based browsers and Firefox. The organization also hopes to release versions for Opera, Safari and Firefox Mobile in the near future.

The extension works by looking at third-party domain names being loaded next to the site being visited. Privacy Badger will try to find out whether those domains load trackers or not, in this case cookies, or whether they are fingerprinting the browser. There are cases where a website stops functioning if a domain is completely blocked. In that case, Privacy Badger will block the ability for that domain to install cookies or receive refer headers, but will allow embedded content to pass through.

It is not the purpose of Privacy Badger to block or counter ads; EFF is aware of the importance of advertisements for websites in order to maintain itself. The extension is only supposed to guarantee people’s privacy, in this case by preventing tracking.

Privacy Badger is working with a new do not track policy, announced by the EFF last Monday. The aim of the dnt policy is to achieve a globally accepted dnt flag, so that internet users can opt-out against online tracking in a clear and unambiguous manner. Privacy Badger will not block third parties that comply with the dnt requirements.

The browser extension scans sites for their commitment to the dnt policy. Other parties that conform to dnt include Disconnect, Adblock, DuckDuckGo, Mixpanel and Medium. The extension is based on the code of Adblock Plus. The reason why the EFF decided to release its own extension was that the organization does not fully agree with products such as Disconnect, ABP, Ghostery and the like. Some are difficult to configure and others have business models that the EFF doesn’t support.