Privacy Badger

Description

Instead of keeping lists of what to block, Privacy Badger automatically discovers trackers based on their behavior. Privacy Badger sends the Global Privacy Control signal to opt you out of data sharing and selling, and the Do Not Track signal to tell companies not to track you. If trackers ignore your wishes, Privacy Badger will learn to block them.

Besides automatic tracker blocking, Privacy Badger replaces potentially useful trackers (video players, comments widgets, etc.) with click-to-activate placeholders, and removes outgoing link click tracking on Facebook and Google, with more privacy protections on the way. To learn more, see our FAQ at https://privacybadger.org/#faq

To get help or to report bugs, please email [email protected]. If you have a GitHub account, you can use our GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues


*** Why does Privacy Badger need to read and change all my data on the websites I visit? ***

When you install Privacy Badger, your browser warns that Privacy Badger can “read and change all your data on the websites you visit”. You are right to be alarmed. You should only install extensions made by organizations you trust.

Privacy Badger requires these permissions to do its job of automatically detecting and blocking trackers on all websites you visit. We are not ironically (or unironically) spying on you. For more information, see our Privacy Badger extension permissions explainer: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/blob/master/doc/permissions.md

Note that the extension permissions warnings only cover what the extension has access to, not what the extension actually does with what it has access to (such as whether the extension secretly uploads your browsing data to its servers). Privacy Badger will never share data about your browsing unless you choose to share it (by filing a broken site report). For more information, see EFF’s Privacy Policy for Software: https://www.eff.org/code/privacy/policy


*** Release notes ***
2021.6.8
* Disabled Google's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). To learn more, visit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea
* Improved tracker detection and blocking by looking up known CNAME tracker aliases. Thanks to AdGuard for providing the CNAME DNS data behind this feature.
* You can now see in the popup when first-party protections such as link unwrapping are active on the site you are on
* Fixed various site breakages
* Added Greek and Hungarian translations
* Improved translations (Simplified Chinese, Esperanto, Hebrew, Korean, European Portuguese, Turkish, Swedish)

2021.2.2
* Added a dark theme. To see it, enable dark mode in operating system or device preferences.
* Added a section to the Widget Replacement tab on the options page to manage the list of widgets that were set to be always allowed on certain sites
* Disabled network prefetching/preloading to improve privacy
* Added replacements for Dailymotion and OK.ru video player widgets
* Fixed various site breakages
* Improved translations (Simplified Chinese, Czech, French, Hebrew)

2020.12.10
* Added a direct link to widget content to replacements for widgets like YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Spotify. You can click this link to watch a video (for example) without sharing the page you are on with the video provider. You can also right-click the link to copy the link URL.
* Fixed "fbclid" tracking parameter removal on Facebook
* Enabled Google Search link unwrapping on Firefox for Android
* Fixed various site breakages
* Improved translations (Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian)

2020.10.7
* Disabled learning (by default) to address privacy concerns. Visit https://www.eff.org/badger-evolution to learn more.
* Added support for Global Privacy Control, a new specification that lets you tell companies you'd like to opt out of data sharing and selling. Visit https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ to learn more.
* Added a new section to the options page to display the browser settings that Privacy Badger overrides for privacy reasons
* Fixed various site breakages
* Improved translations (Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian)