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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

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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] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is ClearURLs even needed?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have like every filter on uBlock Origin filtered except the language ones. Yet when I go on Amazon, I get a huge nasty tracking url still. ClearURLs cleans it up for me, otherwise I wouldn't really need it. Not sure why uBlock doesn't do that.

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

Are you using the clear urls filter list? Copied another post in this thread:

You can replace ClearURLs with a filter list for uBlock Origin. Less CPU resources used.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/ClearURLs%20for%20uBo/clear_urls_uboified.txt

Edit: idk how to link to the post on lemmy.world or if I'm just dumb but I grabbed a kbin.social link to the post.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That seems pretty good but ClearURLs also some neat other stuff to it. Also that's an unofficial list so I don't know how updated or comprehensive it'll be. Also it's pretty hard to find through a search engine tbh whereas ClearURLs is auto installed on my Firefox through addon sync.