A Privacy Tool That Just Might Work

We think “Do Not Track” browser add-ons are pretty much worthless – they assume that everything and everyone is tracking you for evil purposes and thus block everything without regard to what it is or if it may be benfiicial.

Yes, indeed, I tells ya… sometimes cookies are good things and sometimes tracking within a site / domain is a good thing ensuring you don’t see the same ads over and over and sometimes ensuring you see the most updated content. So, assuming that all tracking is bad is like assuming all lawyers are blood suckers, right EB?

We think ad blockers are pretty much worthless too because they don’t block all types of advertisements. Also, we don’t agree with ad blockers because little mom and pops sites depend on the pittance they receive from advertising to help pay the bills. We can’t speak for the giants like Sun Java and other sites whose income is in the millions or billions tacking on ads to make even more. Boo!

Which leads me floundering around for a really creative segue, but alas my aging mind fails me and now we’re just going to be blurting it out…

Do you know what the Electronic Frontier Foundation is? Well, if you don’t it’s pretty much looking out for your privacy and to protect your freedoms on the Internet. They’ve been deeply involved in the fight to keep Net Neutrality – which is a good thing but unfortunately on its way out unless someone can figure out a way to prevent its demise. But nay! Let us not wonder off into the realm of internet freedom and privacy – or on the work that the Electronic Frontier Foundation does. I know you have an inquiring mind and you’ll want to bone up on the EFF so here you go — read all about them here.

With all that being said, we’ve just discovered a new promising privacy tool that is a project of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). It’s calle Privacy Badger – think of it as the smartest, most evolved anti-tracking tool ever invented. It takes not the easy rode – that rode of blocking everything just because – it takes the intellectual rode of blocking only the kind of tracking that follows you from site to site and domain to domain – and might even follow you to your grave if you’re not careful. So it’s not a dumb, old, crappy “do not track” thingie, it’s a smart do-not-track thingy. Some tracking enhances your Web experience and as you know, most of us need all the enhancements we can get our little hands on, right?

And before we go any further with this – if you’re using Internet Explorer, I’m sorry to say, you’re going to have to pass this up – like many of the really good extensions and add-ons out there, they don’t work with Internet Explorer.

But, if you’re using Chrome or Firefox, rejoice! There’s good news for you ahead.

Here are some tantalizing excerpts from the Privacy Badger Web site, which I have meticulously hand-picked for your consupmption.

The link to download Privacy Badger is at the bottom of this article – however i am duly aware that many of you, bored with my writing, have already googled it and found it without reading the amazing information which I have gleaned from the Privacy Badger Web site and posted here for all to see:

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.

How does Privacy Badger work?

When you view a webpage, that page will often be made up of content from many different sources. (For example, a news webpage might load the actual article from the news company, ads from an ad company, and the comments section from a different company that’s been contracted out to provide that service.) Privacy Badger keeps track of all of this. If as you browse the web, the same source seems to be tracking your browser across different websites, then Privacy Badger springs into action, telling your browser not to load any more content from that source. And when your browser stops loading content from a source, that source can no longer track you. Voila!…”

“…What do the red, yellow and green sliders in the Privacy Badger menu mean?

The colors mean the following:

Green means there’s a third party domain, but it hasn’t yet been observed tracking you across multiple sites, so it might be unobjectionable. When you first install Privacy Badger every domain will be in this green state but as you browse, domains will quickly be classified as trackers.

Yellow means that the third party domain appears to be trying to track you, but it is on Privacy Badger’s cookie-blocking “whitelist” of third party domains that, when analyzed, seemed to be necessary for Web functionality. In that case, Privacy Badger will load content from the domain but will try to screen out third party cookies and supercookies from it.

Red means that content from this third party tracker has been completely disallowed.

Privacy Badger analyzes each third party’s behavior over time, and picks what it thinks is the right setting for each domain, but you can adjust the sliders if you wish…”

So for all those intrepid readers out there who have stuck with me all the way through this admirable screed, I shall reward you with a link whereby you can learn more about and/or download Privacy Badger. 

Ooh, couple more things. it’s a browser add-on that does not work with Internet Explorer but does work wonderfully with Chrome and Firefox.

Privacy Badger is beta. Yep that means it’s in testing and if you’re not comfortable running test software, what the heck are you doing running Windows? Eh?