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[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/

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like condoms, doubling up isn't always the best idea I heard. Increased fingerprinting.

[–] bassomitron 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in my opinion. Fingerprinting is going to fingerprint. The whole idea of PB and things like uBlock is that it's trying to block as much fingerprinting as possible. They won't catch everything, but they catch a lot of it. The things they miss is just the cost of using the internet in this day and age, (unless opt for going ultra privacy mode and take even more precautions).

My point is, running two similar plugins isn't going to suddenly make you dramatically stand out any more from fingerprints than not.