EFF launches anti-tracking extension Privacy Badger

The digital civil rights movement Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed an extension for Firefox and Chrome to prevent tracking. The Privacy Badger tool blocks scripts, cookies and advertisements that try to map the surfing behavior of internet users.

According to the EFF, Privacy Badger is the organization’s response to privacy breaches by the advertising industry. The tool, which is still in the alpha phase but according to the EFF is not too buggy, further resembles privacy-protecting extensions such as Ghostery and Disconnect in terms of functionality. Compatible with Firefox and Chrome, the extension will automatically block suspicious scripts and reject cookies used for tracking after analyzing a website. Also, by default, the do-not-track header is sent with every request. Privacy Badger will, however, allow certain elements of third parties to pass through in cases that are necessary, such as embedded images or fonts.

The EFF states that advertisers can prevent their advertisements from being blocked by respecting so-called do-not-track header settings and thus not proceeding to map the surfing behavior of people who do not want this. Whether this will happen on a large scale remains to be seen. This week, for example, Yahoo announced that it was ceasing support for do-not-track. According to the company, do-not-track has never become a widely supported standard and will from now on offer a ‘personalized user experience’.