EFF releases 2.0 version of anti-tracking tool Privacy Badger

The US civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation has released the 2.0 release of its anti-tracking tool Privacy Badger. This extension is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera, and blocks third party trackers.

The new version brings many changes. For example, the extension now supports browsing in ‘incognito’ or ‘private’ tabs and allows users to import and export settings. This should make it easier to transfer the settings to a new system or browser. In addition, the EFF reports that Privacy Badger now causes problems on fewer websites, which has been the case with the extension until now. For example, some content was not loaded.

The site Ghacks writes that the new release does not yet function without any problems, because it causes Google Sheets to crash in Firefox and because webrtc is missing. Webrtc can leak users’ IP addresses in some cases, so Privacy Badger now has a feature to block it. This was introduced alongside the feature to prevent tracking via the ping attribute in html5. Other changes include speed optimizations in Firefox and multiprocess support with Electrolysis, in addition to a shared codebase between the Firefox and Chrome versions.

The EFF describes Privacy Badger as a “privacy tool” rather than an ad blocker because the extension blocks tracking domains. Therefore, the tool may also block ads due to this functionality. Users can indicate per domain whether they want to block, allow or just block cookies. Domains that follow the EFF’s do-not-track policy are excluded from extension blocking. According to the organization, the extension has about 900,000 daily users.