The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently released a plug-in for Chrome and Firefox called Privacy Badger 1.0. A plug-in is a software module, which adds functionality, that can be loaded into a browser. What the Badger plug-in does is block trackers from spying on the web pages you visit.
Why should you care? Because Big Data companies track everything you do online, and what do they do with that data? One thing they do is analyze data to predict consumer behavior. Here are a couple of articles that explain some of the issues: “The Murky World of Third-Party Tracking” is a short overview, while the EFF has a three-part article called “How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them)” that while several years old, is very detailed.
The FTC has gotten involved as well. Here is a link to one of their papers called “Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion?”
I loaded the Badger plug-in as soon as it came out, and I am amazed at the number of trackers it blocks (it does allow a few)! One CNN.com page I visited had over a hundred trackers blocked and a Huffington Post page had almost as many. I also run other plug-ins in Firefox (Ghostery, NoScript, AdBlock Plus, Lightbeam).
The Badger icon in the upper right-hand corner tells you how many are blocked.
The best thing about Badger is that it is very easy to use, unlike NoScript.
Give it a try, and let me know what you think.
Intentional Privacy 