EFF: Sharpening Our Claws: Teaching Privacy Badger to Fight More Third-Party Trackers
Sharpening Our Claws: Teaching Privacy Badger to Fight More Third-Party Trackers The latest release of Privacy Badger gives it the power to detect and block a new class of evasive, pervasive third-party trackers, including Google Analytics. Most blocking tools, like uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and Firefox’s native blocking mode (using Disconect’s block lists), use human-curated lists to decide whether to block or allow third-party resources. But Privacy Badger is different. Rather than rely on a list of known trackers, it discovers and learns to block new trackers in the wild. It works using heuristics , or patterns of behavior, to identify trackers. Last week, we updated Privacy Badger with a new heuristic to help it identify trackers that have flown under its radar in the past. Here’s how it works. What makes a tracker a tracker? All tracker-blockers have to grapple with a fundamental question: what is a tracker, anyway? Often times, it’s obvious. When an ad network sets a th...