Privacy Badger

★★★★★

One of the problems with the modern corporate web is the constant surveillance tracking your activity from site to site to site (mostly used for targeted advertising). Even if you’re willing to see ads, you may not want to be tracked so thoroughly.

Originally, EFF’s extension for blocking trackers was useful mainly because it would automatically detect tracking activity and block it. Eventually someone figured out how to detect that and use it for fingerprinting, so now the extension uses a pre-trained list (updated periodically) instead. Though you can choose to turn auto-learning back on if you want to.

With most browsers offering to block third-party cookies these days, and some specifically including tracking protection and/or ad blocking, the obvious question is: what does Privacy Badger offer that just changing my settings on Firefox or Vivaldi – or installing an ad blocker – doesn’t?

1. It automatically configures settings like turning off Chrome’s misleadingly-named privacy sandbox and turning on Global Privacy Control, even in browsers that don’t have built-in support. (more about that below)

2. It replaces embedded social media widgets, including share buttons and embedded posts, with placeholders. So you can choose whether to enable a Facebook post or TikTok video on some random article or blog post, instead of letting Meta or ByteDance track you as soon as you open the page. (Brave picked up this idea too, but only does it for Facebook, LinkedIn and “X.”)

3. It can still protect browsers like Chromium that only let you block cookies and not other tracking methods like local storage.

The widget placeholders and GPC support are the main reasons I still use it with Firefox and Vivaldi.

Plus, it works on mobile Firefox too!

Wait, what’s GPC?

Global Privacy Control is an automated way to tell websites that you don’t want them to sell your data instead of writing to them one by one. It’s mainly useful in jurisdictions like California that require companies to honor this sort of opt-out.

Some sites will honor it silently. Some will tell you they got the message. I’ve noticed grocery stores including Vons/Safeway and Ralphs/Kroger showing a banner on the first visit in a browser session letting me know that they got the signal and will honor it.

On the flip side, Yahoo shows me a pop-up asking me to please turn it off, I’m missing out of so many things they could do for me if I just agreed to let them sell my data.

Firefox and Brave have settings to enable GPC. Privacy Badger is one of several extensions that can add support for Chromium, Vivaldi, Edge etc.