Privacy Badger v1.0 for Chrome & Firefox

[Arthur]

Download (Chrome, Firefox) / Press Release

 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released Privacy Badger 1.0, a browser extension that blocks some of the sneakiest trackers that try to spy on your Web browsing habits.

 

More than a quarter of a million users have already installed the alpha and beta releases of Privacy Badger. The new Privacy Badger 1.0 includes blocking of certain kinds of super-cookies and browser fingerprinting—the latest ways that some parts of the online tracking industry try to follow Internet users from site to site.

 

“It’s likely you are being tracked by advertisers and other third parties online. You can see some of it when it’s happening, such as ads that follow you around the Web that seem to reflect your past browsing history,” said EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin, lead developer of Privacy Badger. “Those echoes from your past mean you are being tracked, and the records of your online activity are distributed to other third parties—all without your knowledge, control, or consent. But Privacy Badger 1.0 will spot many of the trackers following you without your permission, and will block them or screen out the cookies that do their dirty work.”

 

What is Privacy Badger?

Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared.

 

How is Privacy Badger different to Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery, and other blocking extensions?

Privacy Badger was born out of our desire to be able to recommend a single extension that would automatically analyze and block any tracker or ad that violated the principle of user consent; which could function well without any settings, knowledge, or configuration by the user; which is produced by an organization that is unambiguously working for its users rather than for advertisers; and which uses algorithmic methods to decide what is and isn't tracking.

 

Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!), none of them are exactly what we were looking for. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers. Several of these extensions have business models that we weren't entirely comfortable with. And EFF hopes that by developing rigorous algorithmic and policy methods for detecting and preventing non-consensual tracking, we'll produce a codebase that could in fact be adopted by those other extensions, or by mainstream browsers, to give users maximal control over who does and doesn't get to know what they do online.

 

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[Arthur]

Version 2.0 is out!

 

www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/new-and-improved-privacy-badger-20-here

 

New features with 2.0

Version 2.0 of Privacy Badger includes many improvements for users and developers, including:

 

• Support for "incognito" or "private" browsing
  
• Import/export capabilities, so you can export a backup of what Privacy Badger has learned about your tracker-blocking needs and import that into another browser
  
• Fixes to "break" fewer websites, ensuring that you can both block trackers and enjoy rich content
  
• Improved user interface translation for non-English-speaking users
  
• Blocks to prevent WebRTC from leaking your IP address
  
• Blocks to prevent HTML5 "ping" tracking
  
• Notable speed improvements (Firefox only)
  
• Multiprocess Compatibility (E10S) (Firefox only)
  
• A single code base for both the Firefox and Chrome versions
  

Ending non-consensual browser tracking

With the 2.0 release, the Privacy Badger team remains as committed as ever to end non-consensual browser tracking and promote responsible advertising. Although Privacy Badger blocks many ads in practice, it is more a privacy tool than a strict ad blocker. Privacy Badger encourages advertisers to treat users respectfully and anonymously rather than follow the industry status quo of online tracking. It does this by unblocking content from domains that respect our Do Not Track policy, which states that the participating site will not retain any information about users who have expressed that they do not want to be tracked.

 

Do Not Track and Privacy Badger 2.0 are here to help you block stealthy online tracking and the exploitation of your browsing history. Download Privacy Badger now to take a stand against tracking and join the movement to build a more privacy-friendly web.