Today we are introducing Badger Swarm, a new tool for Privacy Badger that runs distributed Badger Sett scans in the cloud. Badger Swarm helps us continue updating and growing Privacy Badger’s tracker knowledge, as well as continue adding new ways of catching trackers. Thanks to continually expanding Badger Swarm-powered training, Privacy Badger comes packed with its largest blocklist yet.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Privacy Badger has recently started blocking Twitter embedding for me (in the past few days). Does anyone know specifically what Twitter is doing to prompt this? For instance, see this thread on the Ukraine war on Daily Kos, which includes a lot of embedded Twitter posts https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/9/2204752/-Ukraine-Invasion-Day-625-RU-may-experience-redeployment-issues
Badgers never skip leg day
Just use uBlock Origin, does the same thing but one less extension to fingerprint.
Great! I’d be interested in seeing a somewhat detailed comparison between UBlock Origin and Badger Swarm. I really liked the concept of privacy badger, and it seems like the latest updates may have addressed potential fingerprinting issues and improved its slower organic learning/blocking model. I’m definitely going to check this out. 👍
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
Privacy mushroom?
Oh God, the nostalgia
'Member the F-word history?
Snake! It’s a snake!
Am I wrong to assume that this doesn’t add anything beyond what uBlock on medium mode does already? Except (perhaps) ease-of-use and the blocking of first-party trackers; if those even exist*.
Don’t get me wrong; I love EFF’s work and their commitment to digital privacy. I just want to understand if I, personally, would need it.
If you are good at navigating the web on uBlock Medium Mode, and are okay doing the initial “troubleshooting,” to unbreak first time visits to websites, then you probably do not need it. I mean, most trackers won’t run without JS. Also, on Medium mode, you get to see most ad companies’ domains which you can then just block Globally. You can also use uBlock’s selector tool to remove specific parts of a webpage. I find that I use it a lot to remove cookie prompts and others, like YT prompts. So I can use it without having to sign on and remove the anti-adblock prompts.
Albeit there is some overlap, I use still uBlock on Medium Mode along uMatrix since I need a bit more granular control on the sites I use. On top of LibreRedirect to avoid some of the biggest data miners.
You should be fine.
Currently Privacy Badger will de-mangle Google-mangled links in their search results. You can see it discussed in this episode of Security Now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suT0E53jX40 Here are the show notes (ctrl+f for “badger” and you’ll have all the information you need): https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-945-Notes.pdf
I wasn’t using it until I saw this so I installed it despite using uBlock Origin.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=suT0E53jX40
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It’s probably overkill, I think. Based on my understanding of it, there’s a chance Privacy Badger will help you out in a scenario if you happen to re-enable too many things while unbreaking websites in Medium Mode:
But at that point, it would theoretically only catch something uBlock Origin blocklists somehow missed… IMO, highly unlikely.
WE HAVE COME FOR YOUR TRACKERS
More like to avoid them even better. :D
Thanks for sharing, have just re-installed Privacy Badger (I previously uninstalled it as I use uBlock Origin) and enabled “Learn to block new trackers from your browsing” in options.
BTW The BRAVE browser has built in tracking prevention without requiring extension overhead. Works better by default in my experience than either of the two mentioned in the post. YMMV though.
I’ve run UBO and Privacy Badger side by side for years. There’s no harm in having both, as UBO has lots of great features besides tracker blocking (I use the element zapper/blocker almost daily, for instance). They work well together.
Great news!