Things have gotten to the point where many Internet users are starting to assume that almost every website on the Net is spying on them or tracking them in some way. And the sad reality is in most cases, they’re correct — nearly all websites people might visit contain some code that is intended to monitor, track or even “spy” on users. So for the privacy conscious among us, is there anything we can do to stop the madness?
The answer, of course, is yes.
There are several tools out there that look to curtail or even completely prevent website spying and tracking, and one of them comes from what is perhaps the most familiar name in digital rights: The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group’s browser plugin, dubbed Privacy Badger, is now a publicly available beta that can be downloaded for free.
Privacy Badger had previously been an alpha release that, according to the EFF, has been downloaded by more than 150,000 people to date. The free tool “detects and blocks online advertising and other embedded content that tracks you without your permission,” the EFF said in a recent press release.
This great free plugin is available for both Chrome and Firefox, and it can be downloaded from the EFF’s website, which is linked below in our source section.
