this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
596 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

59681 readers
3639 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
596
[EFF] New Privacy Badger Prevents Google From Mangling More of Your Links and Invading Your Privacy (www.eff.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Summary

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a new version of Privacy Badger that updates how it fights "link tracking" across a number of Google products. With this update, Privacy Badger removes tracking from links in Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images results. Privacy Badger now also removes tracking from links added after scrolling through Google Search results.

Link tracking is a technique that allows a company to follow you whenever you click on a link to leave its website. Google uses different techniques for link tracking in different browsers and products. One common approach is to surreptitiously redirect the outgoing request through the tracker's own servers.

The EFF says that there is virtually no benefit to you when this happens, and that the added complexity mostly just helps Google learn more about your browsing.

The new version of Privacy Badger works by blocking all Google link tracking requests at the network layer. This is a more reliable way to prevent tracking, but it is not compatible with Google's Manifest V3 (MV3) extension API.

The EFF says that it would like to see this important functionality gap resolved before MV3 becomes mandatory for all extensions.

Privacy Badger is a free and open-source browser extension that helps to protect your privacy online. It is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

More info and installation links: https://privacybadger.org/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 18_24_61_b_17_17_4 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had the extension forever and had no idea either. Learn something new every day.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not trying to be rude here, but it does say "by EFF technologists" when installing the extension. Also their welcome page for the extension after installing it, states "" A project of the EFF".

I hope these things are read beforehand and just not skipped, ignored or just installed quickly before taking some time to look around / researched.

[–] 18_24_61_b_17_17_4 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fair enough and great points. In my defense I've had it installed for ages and the memory (mine, not my computer's) isn't what it used to be.

EDIT: And to be clear I'm not the one who downvoted you.

[–] shotgun_crab 1 points 1 year ago

There's always that "funny" person downvoting every comment