Most people who surf the web have become more aware that their browsing habits can be monitored by trackers advertisers place on their webpages. These trackers gather your browsing history plus other settings that altogether form a user profile in what is known as fingerprinting. Most browsers such as Firefox have taken measures that safeguard your privacy from these trackers. They even launched Track This, a tool to throw off advertisers and it does it in a really impressive way.
Chrome is still working on its own measures in a new commitment to user privacy made this year but while you wait, you might as well install these three chrome extensions that will do in the meanwhile.
These extensions will not only keep your browsing activities private but also manage cookies. These are small text files created by the websites you visit stored in your computer and provide a way for websites to recognize and track your preferences even across websites by just using a social share button.
Privacy Badger
This is a very simple extension is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that automatically learns to block invisible trackers using tools found in other extensions such as Adblock Plus and Ghostery.
The extension works by keeping track of the sites you browse and observes their behaviour to decide whether they’re tracking you. Once installed, the badger icon may go from different colours:
- Green: the extension didn’t have to block anything on a site
- Yellow: the extension flagged parts of the site and it gives you a list of the sites with a rating beside it. Worth noting is that Yellow means that the site might be trying to track you as the cookies seem necessary for the site to work so the extension has allowed them
- Red: the extension has blocked it completely
Download it for Chrome here.
Cookie AutoDelete
This Chrome extension autodeletes unused cookies from the tabs you’ve closed but gives you the option of keeping the ones you want preferably ones which require login so you don’t have to re-login to every site.
Cookie AutoDelete does not clean data automatically until you enable “Auto-clean” to give you the chance to add sites to the WhiteList.
Get it here.
uBlock Origin
This is an AdBlock Plus alternative now that ABP announced that it would by default allows certain approved ad networks through.
uBlock Origin works the same way but better as it detects and prevents ads from appearing on sites you visit and just like ABP, it shows you what it’s blocked.
