Privacy Badger

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

by sbt • 12 years ago

231 67 12 years ago

tl;dr: A browser add-on that blocks privacy invasive behaviour, not necessarily ads. Some ads are permitted, others are blocked. Currently in alpha, blocking only third-party objectionable behaviour; first-party blocking on the roadmap.

Cool. I shall install this forthwith.

dang5• 12 years ago

All: please don't use "tl;dr" on Hacker News. It's fine, of course, to point out relevant details from an article. But it should be part of a considered comment of your own.

HN values intellectual substance. Good reading, writing, and thinking take time. If we're to have high-quality discussion, we need to inhibit the reflex to snap judgment and give the slower and quieter reflective process a chance to function. Since memes like "tl;dr" are emblems of that shallow reflex, we should heed the broken windows theory and not have them here.

(Not picking on any individual here; PeterWhittaker's comment is fine without the "tl;dr". The concern is the symbol—symbols matter.)

prg318• 12 years ago

Tldr: this guy doesn't like when people use tldr

Edit: oops didn't see he was a mod now his post makes more sense

afternooner3• 12 years ago

I wholeheartedly disagree. Much of the content on HN is long form journalism, some is content that is so specifically specialized in a field, that only those with thesis in that field will understand. Part of the brilliance of conversation on the web is interactions between disparate fields. On may articles, if I have to read all the way through a theoretical physics post and understand it without a synopsis, I wouldn't be able to add any value to the conversation, and the thread becomes an echo chamber. The initialism tl;dr does matter, because it's a clean and easy way to identify the content that someone looking for a synopsis will look for.

I understand the goal. HN doesn't want to become reddit, and values engaged discussion. But tl;dr isn't reddit, and it isn't going away. Language is ever evolving, and the way we talk today would have sent my granddad into a tizzy. Part of being a platform, and HN is a platform for ideas and conversations, is that the people will decide how to manage that relationship. Moderation can only trim the edges, and remove the bad actors, but the tonne and tools will not be set by moderation, but rather cultivation by the users.

PeterWhittaker2• 12 years ago

tl;dr is a perfectly useful meme, better (IM(NS)HO) than such dry fluff as "abstract", "summary", what-have-you.

We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.) But we are all of us limited in our time and attention.

I consider tl;dr on HN a form of curation: "Here is a pithy summary as to why you should, perchance, take the time to read TFA."

Many is the time I have RTFAd only because of a tl;dr provided by another HNer, headlines being worth less than the paper on which they were never even written. I attempt humbly (who the frak am I kidding?) to return the favour to others.

"Please don't"? WTF for? Some memes have utility, anything that enables communication and understanding is good.

IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV. IANAL but I don't see how that's relevant.

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

A substantial portion of the uses of tl;dr I've seen on HN are summaries of comments, not the article (and the most common, or close to it, is people using tl;dr to provide a short summary of their own in-depth comment.)

Its become a widely accepted online shorthand for "or, more succinctly, ...", so "don't use it on HN" is a pretty weird dictate. Yes, the etymology of the shorthand is a abbreviation for "Too long, didn't read", but except when its used alone, that's actually fairly distant from the meaning it has taken on in use.

Karunamon3• 12 years ago

Neat! Adblock blocks ads, Noscript for dodgy scripts, and it looks like this has some overlap with those as well as a cookie handler.

That looks like the unholy trinity of tracking systems dealt with.

canvia• 12 years ago

Don't forget BetterPrivacy for removing flash cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy...

Create4• 12 years ago

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Create4• 12 years ago

They are not John Poindexter, they’re trying to sell advertising. But make no mistake about it – they are in the surveillance business; that is how they make money: they surveil people and use that to profit.

And so the effect is the same.

http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie...

Karunamon3• 12 years ago

Call me when someone gets hauled off to Guantanamo because of ad demographics.

The lack of nuance here when it comes to "tracking" is insane. I can see wanting to block them for whatever reason, but I can't understand this reduction to the absurd chicken-little behavior when it comes to ad targeting.

natch• 12 years ago

Nice. Some feedback: The "first run" page doesn't tell me clearly that anything has been installed or has started working. This kind of information should be really clear and prominent, the largest thing on the page. Instead it's not even there at all, as far as I can see.

Edit: Please don't reply and say "you can check if it's working by blah blah blah." That is missing the point. My point is that EFF should fix the extension to make this communication clear for ALL users.

mister_m• 12 years ago

Add an issue on the github project if you please!

frncscgmz• 12 years ago

Kinda off-topic but, am I the only one who thought that background was moving?

Had to blink a couple of times to get used to.

tcfunk• 12 years ago

Yeah for me there is sort of an illusion going on where the hexagonal patterns that I'm not looking at directly seem to be growing...kind trippy.

iamtew• 12 years ago

It was the first thing I noticed indeed. I was thinking it was some animations on the website first.

Very similar to the example gallery on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_illusion

gyosko2• 12 years ago

Shall I remove ADB and ghostery and just go with Privacy Badger?

vsviridov2• 12 years ago

No, i tried that and it's not at the state to provide adequate replacement. But I have high hopes.

gyosko2• 12 years ago

Thanks. I was thinking the same,but wanted to hear other opinions.

vsviridov2• 12 years ago

Also, Disconnect extension is a non-proprietary alternative to Ghostery.

https://prism-break.org/en/subcategories/windows-web-browser...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I don't know about ADB, but I find the Privacy Badger a little easier to use and understand than something like Ghostery. I think it's also a little easier to unblock stuff when something isn't working because of it.

pxndx• 12 years ago

I disabled third party cookies in Chrome. Doesn't this basically do the same?

EduardoBautista• 12 years ago

They can still collect data from you, just not persist anything through cookies.

driverdan2• 12 years ago

Nope. That's a good first step but here are many ways to track you outside of 3rd party cookies. Google Analytics, for example, uses 1st party cookies.

psykovsky• 12 years ago

and that's why I have the following in my hosts file, together with thousands more.

127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com

I find it doesn't slow down browsers as much as adblock and similar extensions.

atmosx• 12 years ago

I wonder, is there any page worth visiting, where the icon does actually turn green?!

fyrabanks• 12 years ago

I don't think the color coding system is working quite right. It's red on eff.org...

pix64• 12 years ago

The icon doesn't change color. Click on the icon. Each third party domain has its own slider which is colored.

Gracana3• 12 years ago

Speaking of privacy badgering... Why won't firefox let me create a security exception to view this page? Without a way to jump through that hoop, I can't even view the page.

handsomeransoms• 12 years ago

(Firefox dev here) When you say Security Exception, do you mean you're seeing a certificate error on this page? The certificate is valid for me, so that indicates something dodgy on your end (perhaps a captive portal, or middlebox on a corporate network).

Gracana3• 12 years ago

I'm behind a simple NAT, but that's never caused trouble before. Other self-signed certs work fine, but this one doesn't give me the "I understand the risks" option.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/NTLY7ZB.png

You're saying it's completely valid though? Bizarre.

13throwaway• 12 years ago

They are probably using HSTS to keep users from accepting unsafe certs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security

tedmielczarek• 12 years ago

I saw a bug on this but I'm on my phone and can't find it. It's a misconfiguration on their end. They're missing an intermediate cert in the chain and have HSTS enabled. Oddly, if you visit some other site we'll cache the intermediate and then it will work.

baumbart• 12 years ago

Could maybe someone explain to me: What exactly is wrong with Adblock Edge + Ghostery? If not, why do they make another similar extension then? There is no actual manual configuration needed, they don't use me for their business model (or none of that I know).

UVB-76• 12 years ago

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.

jordanlev• 12 years ago

I'm curious if the functionality is only enabled if I have the "Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked" setting turned on in my browser preferences? There is nothing explicitly said about this in the FAQ's, but there are references to the purpose of this being "so sites will honor the Do Not Track feature", so it seems to be implying that it only does its thing if I have "Do Not Track" enabled?

Thanks!

akavel• 12 years ago

Both in Chromium and Firefox, after installation, an embedded "firstRun.html" page is shown, which includes the following statement:

[...] We send the Do Not Track header with each request, and our extension evaluates the likelihood that you are still being tracked. [...]

[Still, I didn't attempt to verify this in code or by sniffing packets.]

I, on the other hand, would be very interested to know if it is expected to work OK with NoScript (and NoScript with it)?

[edit] From https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/73 and https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/463750477075578880 I assume it is compatible with NoScript.

click170• 12 years ago

First place I went to was "I am an online advertising / tracking company. How do I stop Privacy Badger from blocking me?".

If all it takes is MaliciousCompany.com from posting some text document in the right spot to get PrivacyBadget to whitelist the page, how is this any better than DNT?

Do they have a way of blacklisting domains that abuse this?

Edit: Also, I LOVE the idea behind this and installed it immediately to compliment ABP and Ghostery.

synchronise• 12 years ago

Firstly, isn't this designed to completely replace Ghostery?

Secondly, doesn't Ghostery have privacy issues by sending your browsing history to a 3rd party?

pyroh• 12 years ago

It's optional, off by default, and is anonymized (apparently).

ashmud• 12 years ago

"[...] in Firefox, Privacy Badger will be automatically deactivated when you enter Private Browsing Mode [...]". This is kind of a deal breaker for me. I frequently use Private Browsing to quickly open a single browser window without waiting for all my session windows/tabs to open.

reedlaw• 12 years ago

After reading about AdBlock Plus's effect on memory usage in Firefox[1] I immediately disabled it. Seeing that this is also based on the ABP codebase, I wonder if it will run into the same issue.

1. https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

papaf• 12 years ago

Have you tried AdBlock edge? Its much faster. I have no idea if this is because it is using less memory though.

donniezazen• 12 years ago

I haven't made up my mind if tracking is altogether bad. I certainly enjoy Google showing me relevant ads in a non-malware-appearance. Privacy is good in theory but out of convenience I keep using services that compromise my private information and I myself willingly leave personal information online on several websites. Anything is as strong as your weakest link. And their are too many weak links in my online circle.

xyliamaxwell• 12 years ago

Looks good - I'm going to try it when it's in Beta.

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