You may want to opt back in to local learning if you regularly browse less popular websites.

Privacy Badger no longer learns from your browsing by default, as “local learning” may make you more identifiable to websites. This “remote learning” automatically discovers trackers present on thousands of the most popular sites on the Web. If it observes a single third-party host tracking you on three separate sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third-party tracker.īy default, Privacy Badger receives periodic learning updates from Badger Sett, our Badger training project. Privacy Badger looks for tracking techniques like uniquely identifying cookies, local storage “supercookies,” and canvas fingerprinting. Voila!Īt a more technical level, Privacy Badger keeps note of the “third party” domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit. And when your browser stops loading content from a source, that source can no longer track you. 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. (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. When you view a webpage, that page will often be made up of content from many different sources. ( See also.) How does Privacy Badger work?

What is and isn’t considered a tracker is entirely based on how a specific domain acts, not on human judgment. Privacy Badger is an algorithmic tracker blocker – we define what “tracking” looks like, and then Privacy Badger blocks or restricts domains that it observes tracking in the wild. Second, most other blockers rely on a human-curated list of domains or URLs to block. The extension doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you in fact, one of our goals is to incentivize advertisers to adopt better privacy practices. First, while most other blocking extensions prioritize blocking ads, Privacy Badger is purely a tracker-blocker. 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.Īs a result, Privacy Badger differs from traditional ad-blocking extensions in two key ways.

How is Privacy Badger different from other blocking extensions? To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared. 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. Privacy Badger is a browser extension that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.

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