DOdoener·Sep 28, 2025Submission
Privacy Badger should support Safari #549
3 points · Open discussionEFForg
privacybadger
JavaScript2014–2025
EFForg / privacybadger
privacybadger
Privacy Badger is a browser extension made by EFF to stop companies from spying on you online
17Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Privacy Badger is a browser extension made by EFF to stop companies from spying on you online
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-05-02 12:41:38 UTC to 2025-09-28 13:22:29 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
18 sourcesAs an example, feeds available on every github repo:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/commits.atom
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/tags.atom
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/releases.atom
In Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feedsEFF's Privacy Badger shows a few potential trackers when loading that page.
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger
In Designing a Lego orreryHi, Privacy Badger dev here. Here are a couple of links to answers to start:
- https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
- https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/discussions/2786#dis...
In Privacy Badger is a browser extension that learns to block invisible trackersOverview of Chrome Manifest V3 Proposal's Impact Upon Privacy Badger
1 points · Open discussionActually, this is something that should be fixed in Privacy Badger. They can detect the URL parameter that flips ads from personalized to non-personalized (npa=1) and block accordingly.
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/2046
In Flattr now deletes your web browsing history within 3 monthsPrivacyBadger is a bit more aggressive in blocking CDNs than uMatrix/Ghostery/uBlock Origin because it's more than just an ad blocker: it's meant for privacy across the board.
According to https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/746 CDNs are often blocked because they set localstore/cookies and do some stuff that might look like canvas fingerprinting. I would update your privacybadger, if you haven't. It might have been fixed.
In An all-in-one beginner's guide to modern React application developmentPrivacy Badger uses simple heuristics like cookie entropy estimation, domain prevalence (how many other domains embed that domain's stuff): https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/blob/master/src/js/h...
and static block lists https://www.eff.org/files/cookieblocklist_new.txt
In Intelligent Tracking PreventionEFF have been working on something a little bit more practical, and have re-engaged activity on it. [0]
[0] https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/266
In The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is HereThis is (IMO) an un-substantive reply to what amounts to fear-mongering. See their previous discussion about issue #1 that tdkl mentioned above (https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/266), and you'll see the following comment at the bottom:
> This was discussed in the bi-weekly developers meeting on 9/27.
> Threat model: A local attacker would be able to view a subset of
> cleared history (only visited domains, not urls or times).
> This solution does not actually help against that since the
> attacker could still see if the users has visited site n by taking
> H(n) and searching for it in privacy badger's database.
> what does this stop: an attacker who can view pb data but doesn't
> know how to hash strings.
> other option: respect history clearing events, and remove domains
> from snitch map when they are removed from history.
Read the rest
> problem: this will break privacy badger if the user consistently
> clears their entire history.
So it appears that this is a local list (stored on your filesystem) that could be compromised and show your website history in the case of a local attacker accessing your machine. The "glib" remark to this is that you should be using full-disk-encryption with LUKS and a FOSS operating system as well, so this file shouldn't be exposed because any local attackers would have to defeat your encryption and get your machine to boot first. More realistically: suppose someone has access to this file. What else can a local attacker do on your machine to compromise your privacy? Do you really think they're going to go through a set of scrubbed website history (domains only, not URLs, no timestamps) to somehow ruin your life? If you don't clear your browser history entirely after every session you're exposing way more than this regardless. I fail to see how this is a significant issue in light of the fact that it requires local access to even become a problem.
As for issue #2, the fact that a browser extension (that you probably downloaded from the EFF) links to the EFF is not surprising. They update the do-not-track list, as well as the most recent cookie block list. The code is already coming upstream from the EFF (served from github, or the Chrome store, or the Firefox add-on marketplace, etc). Having to pull in up-to-date lists doesn't sound like the app isn't working as intended. I certainly can't maintain these lists and construct them myself, less so if I nuke all history of using the add-on every time I restart my browser.
Disclaimer: I do not work for EFF, all the information above was through a cursory search through the source on Github and probably doesn't reflect the full story, but the situation is certainly is more nuanced than "PrivacyBadger is secretly trying to undermine your privacy and security". It bothers me that people pull up minor things like this and shoot down projects that are legitimately working to try and make the web a place with less surveillance.
User gitarr on reddit[1]:
1) Privacy Badger maintains a separate, plain-text list of every domain you've ever visited: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/1064
2) Every time you start Firefox, Privacy Badger will connect to a IP on port 443. https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/1065
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5i7st0/the_new_and_i...
In The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is HereAs many as we can implement! Pull requests are welcome :)
Good starting places for the current heuristics:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/sr...
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/master/sr...
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/blob/stable/sr...
In Privacy Badger – Block spying ads and invisible trackersAlthough NYT shouldn't get off scott-free, I think it's worth pointing out that they probably had very little to do with this and more than likely had no idea about it. The WebRTC 'tracking' was from a script from an ad network[1] used by at least Ars Technica and The Washington Post.
As someone who works on sites implementing display advertising using these sorts of networks, I have nothing but contempt for the developers that are writing these JS. I've lost count of all the JS errors they cause (currently I see a lot of `Can't find variable: _body`), or just errant console.log messages (one on every browser scroll or resize was fun).
[1]: Edit: Amusingly I found a developer arguing for this WebRTC-punching, who says he's from White Ops (whiteops.com) working on anti-bot tools https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/issues/431#iss.
Read the rest
It sounds like the requests were a bug:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/issues/431#iss...
This looks like it's trying to exercise every dark corner of the user's browser in order to ensure that the browser is a real, eyeball-facing browser and not just a URL fetcher, PhantomJS/SlimerJS, or a clickjacking plugin being used to fraudulently click ads.
I think it's easy to see both sides here: tools like this are a powerful way to detect and combat botnets and click fraud, but if/when weaponized they're also a form of browser fingerprinting which is a nasty way to ruin anonymity across the web.
IMO there are a lot of bigger targets on the Taxonomy of Bad Internet Things: malware-serving bottom-tier ad networks, "wrapped download" sites, clickjacking, and especially cross-site correlative "analytics" companies come to mind as bei
Read the rest
ng more sinister to privacy than Dan Kaminsky going botnet hunting.
Additionally, the STUN attempts are supposedly gone since yesterday:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome/issues/431#iss...
In The New York Times uses WebRTC to gather local IP addressesShowing the 15 most recent of 18 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.