Phased Array

What?

A script that generates a privacy-focussed list of tracker domains that have been identified by DuckDuckGo's Tracker Radar for use in ad blocker solutions like pi-hole.

Requirements

This script requires Python >= 3.6.

How?

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/rto/phased-array.git phased-array
cd phased-array
python generate_lists.py

You can customise the input directory, output file pathname, and the line prefix via the command-line.

You will likely also want to pick which categories you want to exclude from the list (see Limitations / Warnings below).

Setting a --line-prefix can be used to generate a hosts formatted list.

python generate_lists.py \
    --input-directory my-tracker/domains \
    --output-pathname /path/to/my-output.txt \
    --destination-address '127.0.0.1' \
    --exclude-uncategorized \
    --exclude-category CDN \
    --exclude-category 'Embedded Content' \
    --exclude-category 'Federated Login'

See --help for a full list of configuration options.

Limitations / Warnings

Striking a balance between privacy and usability is tough!

Blocking by domain name can be a particularly blunt tool. By default the Tracker Radar includes domains for many popular websites and apps that you may wish to use on a daily basis. If you do not set any exclude categories then your output may result in 'undesirable behaviour', i.e. your favourite website/app may stop working.

For example, github.com, google.com, paypal.com, etc would all be blocked if we included every single domain.

By default we have chosen to exclude any domain that matches one or more of the following categories: CDN, Embedded Content, Federated Login, Non-tracking, Online Payment, SSO.

Depending on your personal preference or concerns you may wish to filter on different categories.

Future improvements

• Generate different types of output (domains, hosts, regex)
• Improve the way that we filter domains in or out of the list

Any help on these gratefully received! :-)

Source data

This project makes use of the Tracker Radar data from DuckDuckGo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).