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Privacy Badger – Block spying ads and invisible trackers
- bobsky 11y agoNice. It works well with other extensions i.e. adblockers - Privacy Badger can significantly increase your privacy online because Adblock does not block invisible trackers by default; via FAQ. Another fantastic extension from the EFF team with collaboration from The Tor Project, is HTTPS Everywhere, get it here https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
- blinkingled 11y agoAny idea what's the difference between Privacy Badger and Self Destructing Cookies addon? I would think SDC will also stop any tracking by deleting the cookies?
- swartzcr 11y agoPrivacy Badger currently detects tracking via regular cookies, HTML5 local storage 'cookies', and canvas fingerprinting, with more methods aimed to be supported in future releases
- mirimir 11y agoWhat other tracking methods does Privacy Badger plan to block in future releases? One can always test against evercookie.[0] And perhaps EFF could host a trustable demo site, along the lines of Panopticlick. I do get that this is an arms race, and that proprietary methods may be running under the radar, as Verizon's UIDH did for two years.[1] [0] https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/ https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/ [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/30/verizon_uidh_super_cookie_killer/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/30/verizon_uidh_super_c...
- pde3 11y agoAs many as we can implement! Pull requests are welcome :) Good starting places for the current heuristics: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/src/heuristicblocking.js#L478 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/sr... https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/master/src/webrequest.js#L358 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/master/sr... https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/src/fingerprinting.js https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/sr...
- aidenn0 11y agoIt won't currently block most of the evercookie tests, since it currently only targets 3rd-party tracking.
- mtgx 11y agoIs Privacy Badger still necessary for people that already use ublock and its own tracking filters?
- shkkmo 11y agoYou can use Privacy Badger on sites that you want to support with ad views (as long as those adds don't track you). A good example of this is many of the webcomics I read. Many of the adds on those sites are for other webcomics, I've found a couple of good new webcomics that way.
- bitJericho 11y agoMuch better to simply buy their merchandise instead.
- bitJericho 11y agoYes. I use both ublock origin and privacy badger and for the majority of sites both plugins detect and block stuff.
- pde3 11y agoublock is great software (it didn't exist when we started work on PB!) and so there are only a few things PB will catch that it doesn't. But there are some. For instance, PB will replace widgets such as Tweet and Facebook like buttons with locally hosted, non-tracking variants. And PB may catch new trackers faster than ublock because it uses algorithmic detection rather than requiring a blocklist.
- joosters 11y agoIs their hand-crafted 'yellow list' of allowed trackers viewable online?
- mikegerwitz 11y agohttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/master/doc/sample_cookieblocklist.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome...
- joosters 11y agoThanks! Some of the entries seem suspect, e.g. YouTube.com - why do they think that Google won't track you through pages with YouTube embedded items?
- schoen 11y agoThe entries there are things that seemed especially important for sites' functionality; they are supposed to be there as a result of these criteria: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/blob/master/yellowlist-criteria.txt https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/blob/master/y... If you don't want something to be on the list, you can also override it in your own copy of Privacy Badger.
- joosters 11y agoIt still seems odd. Most users who install the extension aren't going to carefully read an obscure GitHub page, they will wrongly assume that they are now protected, while the 'yellow' list of very common sites is still allowing many big companies to continue to track them. That seems wrong to me.
- _lce0 11y agoNice addition to my list - uBlock Origin - Self-Destructing Cookies - BetterPrivacy - HTTPS-Everywhere - Privacy Badger
- ikeboy 11y agoI would add Blur.
- flanbiscuit 11y agoAnd Random Agent Spoofer (FF only as far as I know) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-... because of this: https://www.privacytools.io/#browser https://www.privacytools.io/#browser
- sbarre 11y agoHuh.. I never would have thought to use system-installed fonts to uniquely ID a browser like that..
- redwards510 11y agoI understand that spoofing one's user-agent can be very effective at fooling malware designed to for specific browsers. However, in practice I have ran into strange problems when doing this. Is there a generic user agent string I could use that would hide my browser vendor and make all sites display content designed for evergreen browsers?
- ikeboy 11y agoAny way to hide the addon list in chrome?
- DaveWalk 11y agoDoes this supercede Blender? It looks like it has more features to say the least... https://github.com/meh/blender https://github.com/meh/blender
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- peteretep 11y agoI would be interested in an easy-to-use local packet sniffer that attempted to give me hints on what I was leaking - what isn't via https from all apps on my machine, for example. Obviously wireshark would get you 50% of the way there - to add to that then, a pretty UI focussed on scaring users with what information is being leaked - hostnames for SSL sites they're visiting for example.
- schoen 11y agoThis is a great project idea. A challenge is in classifying all of the elements of every protocol dissector as interesting or uninteresting. For example, TCP sequence numbers are high-entropy but low-consequence. MAC addresses are high-severity but normally not propagated to an ISP or a remote site operator. There are also tensions between trying to identify leaks to a network eavesdropper and trying to identify leaks to a remote site (or ad network). In many people's analysis, the network eavesdropper is worse because you didn't mean to communicate with them at all, so any information they derive whatsoever is a pure loss of communications security. But for projects like Tor Browser and Privacy Badger, it counts as a loss of privacy if different sites can recognize you as the same user, even if you intentionally communicated with those sites. Using HTTPS will prevent a sniffer from recognizing that some tracking cookies or identifiers are being sent, so you simultaneously get a true improvement against the network adversary and a false negative measuring privacy against the ad networks.
- flatulentone 11y agoConsidering that digital electric meters have been compromised, and that the one I studied had dual-band radios including WiFi spectrum, it may be best to assume that there may be unexpected data pathways that could use a MAC address. Note that the WiFi of many routers broadcasts the wired MAC addresses on the LAN as well as the wireless clients. You're right about false-negatives with sniffers. If you read the source on pages you visit, you'll see https analytics data mining, so don't assume that every outgoing https connection is okay. (and some browsers don't use your normal DNS / hosts settings, so sites you think are blocked may not be)
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- retube 11y agoIs not simply turning off cookies for external domains a fairly effective way of cutting a lot of tracking? What's the downside to doing this?
- wtallis 11y agoPrivacy Badger is for people who want to use someone else's curated list of what to block. You can accomplish the same manually by using other extensions to block by default third-party requests and third-party cookies.
- sethd 11y agoYou have to enable JavaScript on that page just to read the text in a sane manor, otherwise it's mostly white on a light gray background and barely legible. (Firefox / OS X)
- PhantomGremlin 11y agobarely legible That's exactly what I thought. Interesting that they're so hostile to non-JS people. There's another trick that works on many sites, including this one. Keep JS disabled but do View/Page Style/No Style. IMO the site looks better that way than with JS enabled. Edit: one other trick I use frequently in Firefox for sites with poor contrast. Preferences/Content/Colors/Override the colors .../Always. Kind of a hassle to traverse so many menus. I'm sure there are ways to make that easier to do, but I'm a muggle when it comes to this stuff.
- escobar 11y ago> in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code! This makes me sad. They should have based it on uBlock. ABP is very bloated, and really caused issues for my browsing experience. Not sure if I want to try it after reading that.
- swartzcr 11y agoOnly the Chrome extension of Privacy Badger uses ABP code. And it only uses it for managing the blocklists it creates. Most of the function of Privacy Badger is run separately from the ABP code, and to be honest my first task for the next version is to get rid of ABP completely :)
- benologist 11y agoIs a Safari extension on your roadmap?
- swartzcr 11y agoYes we are definitely thinking about a Safari extension!
- vitd 11y agoThank you! I'd be very interested in one, as well.
- flatulentone 11y agoPrivacy from OS creators is likely outside of the scope of your project, but I thought I'd pass along recently observing that filtering using the hosts file on older Intel OS X which works for other browsers does not seem to be effective for Safari. I'd long ago read of MS using their own DNS for IE, perhaps Apple is doing something similar? It could be done for performance reasons, but it certainly has privacy implications. I hope you consider things like blocking loading of webpage icons, and something to deal with data being appended to redirects or even CSS calls when cookies are disabled. I'd read about detecting caching of slightly different colored versions of icons and beacons. Sneaky offsite https accesses (analytics etc) are commonly bundled in a pages JS and NoScript doesn't alert to that. Also, some browsers seem to make accesses to a number of sites on startup, before even going to open a page. Widening the view from "advertisers" to data-mining contractors that even do drive-bys, it might also be worthwhile to study what could block local data broadcasts by code designed to modulate r.f. noise leaking from our machines. Tune across the A.M. broadcast band on a nearby battery operated radio. I've noted that sometimes there's much more pulsed/bursty noise that doesn't seem to be tied to any obviously more demanding content. Some of the insideous Ad-Choices content seems to go beyond Flash for hiding data. From the plugin being called when there wasn't any visible content needing it, I think even Quicktime is being used to cache data. It would really help if scripts from one tab could not be accessed by another, and were killed on closing the parent tab. I guess the litterboxing would best be done by a trusted browser? Bring on the worming tablets!
- justizin 11y agoWould be great to see Safari support for this, was a happy Privacy Badger user on FF for some time.
- phantom_oracle 11y agoQuestion to EFF: Does Privacy Badger itself track me? I know I could read through the source-code, but it would be quicker for myself (and others) to know if any tracking is done by EFF itself.
- schoen 11y agoI asked one of the developers, who said: "Nope! Privacy badger does not send any information about your browsing to the EFF. The only way EFF will get information from you is if you choose to report a broken site, in which case it will only send information about the site you're reporting on, and that information is governed by the standard EFF privacy policy."
- cautious_int 11y agoThe FAQ site has this sentence: Privacy Badger is governed by EFF's Privacy Policy for Software. In the privacy policy you have this: Software Downloads: If you download and install software from EFF's web site, we may collect information about your visit to our site. Once installed, our software may also connect automatically to our site to attempt to determine if updated versions are available. As a result, our site may log information related to the software downloads, such as your computer's IP address. Our collection, anonymization, and use of that data is described our web site privacy policy. Web site privacy policy has this to say about the collected information: Disclosure of Your Information While EFF endeavors to provide the highest level of protection for your information, we may disclose personally identifiable information about you to third parties in limited circumstances, including: (1) with your consent; or (2) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order. So as a start you might want to disable automatic updates
- bni 11y agoSafari already has a setting, Cookies and Website data: Allow from websites I visit. Is Privacy Badger the functional equivalent of that Safari feature?
- mey 11y agoPrivacy Badger inspects the target domain and then pulls out requests to 3rd party domains. If you go to cnn.com and it makes additional request from your browser for resources at say facebook.com. Those 3rd party requests can be allowed, block cookies from the 3rd party or blocked entirely (so the request is not made). The really nice bit, is if Privacy Badger see's requests to the same 3rd party across multiple places, it'll filter it down automatically.
- MacsHeadroom 11y agoNo, the only browser with a functional equivalent to privacy badger is Firefox- and currently only in the Beta version.
- SwellJoe 11y agoThis may be exactly what I want. I don't actually mind ads that respect my privacy and my attention. If ads didn't track my every move and didn't disrupt my workflow by making noises without permission or otherwise stealing my attention and time, I would have zero use for an ad blocking tool. Of course, this doesn't say anything about stopping those invasive noisy ads or ads that block content, so I may still have to keep using uBlock. Maybe in some future ideal world, advertisers will learn that if they want me to see their ads, at all, they have to respect my privacy, my time, and my attention. Maybe someone needs to make a "show only ads from people who aren't assholes" plugin.
- j_baker 11y agoThe "show only ads from people who aren't assholes" is basically what AdblockPlus does.
- DaveWalk 11y agoGood point. I know EFF has a mission versus the one-man show that is ABP, but isn't this mostly identical otherwise? Is Privacy Badger just APP with a political statement attached? Maybe there's something to be said for that...put your money where your browser is and support the web you want. You could also just donate to the EFF, I guess.
- schoen 11y agoABP's default blocklist only blocks visible ads. Although there are also tracking-related ABP lists, they are manually-curated, which is different from Privacy Badger's attempts to detect trackers algorithmically.
- glass- 11y agoABP is not a one-man show, it's now developed by a company (Eyeo GmbH) that makes a lot of money getting companies like Google to buy into their "acceptable ads" scheme. ABP also considers ads that track people (such as Google's) to be acceptable and whitelists them by default.
- mey 11y agoI've been using this plugin since it's beta days and it's an excellent approach to privacy issues online and 3rd party entities.
- _delirium 11y agoI've also been using it for about a year and am generally happy with it. One caveat is that it does sometimes end up breaking site functionality when it blocks a script from loading, occasionally in confusing ways. Usually you can fix this by overriding a few of the blocked things in the dropdown list, but it takes a little bit of technical savvy to figure out what needs to be allowed. I had to disable it on my parents' computer because they got frustrated by sites breaking. This is mostly with an earlier version; I just upgraded to 1.0 today.
- core2 11y agoI've sent "Do Not Charge" signal to the cashier on my way out of the store. He said I need Charge Badger, but it's not available until 2017. I've tried also "Do Not Track", but he refused to close his eyes. He charged me. Damn.
- nivla 11y agoDoes anyone know if this includes a database of tracking hosts or if its self learning? Because for me on Reddit it counts all the CDN's as tracking domains and the actual tracking domains as the non-tracking ones [1]. [1] http://i.imgur.com/7aw6rHo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7aw6rHo.jpg
- schoen 11y agoOne of the developers answers: "It's self learning! Things above the that divider are things that are reading or writing cookie, html5 local storage, or canvas data. Below are third parties that are not. You can manually change any of them, and if one of those domains is blacklisted via another site it will appear above that divider in the future."
- antsar 11y agoAccording to EFF's Panopticlick[0], the biggest thing making my browser unique is the list of plugins that I am running. Short of disabling JavaScript, I don't know of a way to prevent that. Can this hypothetically be solved with Privacy Badger and are there plans to do so? [0] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
- swartzcr 11y agoYes there are plans to do that for the next release of PB :)
- stephengillie 11y agoThis is yet another benefit to whitelisting JavaScript. Faster page load, more lightweight pages, less advertising and spying and crapware, less information going out. And if you like a site you can enable it. Go ahead, call me crazy like most people do.
- jakeogh 11y agoThe web is so much better without it. It's downright annoying to use someone else's JS enabled browser. Rough config for surf: https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/b23aac080c5c74310c88 https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/b23aac080c5c74310c88
- thiagowfx 11y agohttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/noscript/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/noscript/
- RexRollman 11y agoNoScript is a great extension. Even if you never used it to block anything, it is a real eye-opener on just how much stuff is being loaded when you visit a website.
- JadeNB 11y ago
- unicornporn 11y agoBadger is based on ABP code, so I suspect it would affect the performance gains I got by switching to uBlock Origin.
- chmars 11y agoI got the following Chrome warning about the extension: This extension is slowing down Google Chrome. You should disable it to restore Google Chrome's performance. Any other users with this issue?
- snarkyturtle 11y agoJust peeked into the extensions tab to uninstall ghostery and saw this, hopefully it'll get fixed soon.
- snarkyturtle 11y agoJust peeked into the extensions tab to uninstall ghostery and saw this, hopefully it'll get fixed soon.
- bndw 11y agoI've been running this extension for a couple months and just noticed this warning.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI'm a decent fan of this because it doesn't block ads that behave themselves. And ad blocking is still morally corrupt.
- slxh 11y agoThe back and forward browser buttons appear to break the status reported by this extension.
- dannysu 11y agoI was using Privacy Badger, Ghostery, Disconnect, AdBlock Edge or uBlock. Nowadays I just use uMatrix[0] & Self-Destructing Cookies to have a whitelist browsing experience rather than a blacklist experience. Perhaps when Privacy Badger does more for detection of first party stuff, then I'll add it back again. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
- xs 11y agoEFF team. Grats on having this out for almost a year now. Any stats from this that you're willing to share? Like for instance have any advertisers noticed this yet and stopped tracking people so ads can be displayed? I've got widgets on my website for disqus, twitter, facebook, etc and each of these are blocked by PB. This upsets me as the website owner that content I want my user to see is being blocked. Any word from them about this?
- adamzubi 11y agohttp://googler700.blogspot.com/ http://googler700.blogspot.com/
- core2 11y agoHow much money will EFF negotiate from Google to enable Ads? AdBlock got 500 Mil, you can go for a Billion. Go Go Go.