Week 3 Similar Projects Privacy Badger

Privacy Badger

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Privacy Badger is by definition an ad-blocker in that once installed in the browser as a plugin it reads the scripts being loaded for the page and determines who they are from, what their intended purpose is and if it knows they are used to track your web usage it blocks them from loading.

It's provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization working to make the web safer.

The good points on the project is that

• The source code is released as open-source and available on github https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger
• The information window gives your information on what site is tracking you, if it is and how severely via a traffic-light system (green ok, yellow its tracking you but is not flagged as suspicious, red is actively suspicious and blocked).
• You can add to these block-lists via the settings menu and download the data.

Bad points

• The UI is quite technical and dated, unlike other competing add-ons.
• It mentions only checking cookies, html5 content and local storage, though there may be other methods of tracking you which leads to funding new development for new features. There is a project kanban board on github (https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/projects/1) and the project is open-source so new features and improvements can be suggested.