What is Privacy Badger?

Privacy Badger is a free Privacy Enhancing Tool to help you protect your privacy online. It was created by the Electronic Fronteer Foundation: a non-profit foundation based in the US that fights to protect our digital privacy. It's a plugin you install in your browser on the computer or laptop (for example Chrome, Safari or Firefox) and then blocks all the other websites and cookies that are tracking you. 

What are cookies, you ask? They do sound delicious, but online they are tiny bits of code in websites that allow companies to see everything we do and click on. That is how advertising companies know exactly who you are and what you like, so they can send you more personalised ads. Google and Facebook do the same: they try to find out as much about us as possible so they can use and sell this information for money. 

If you want to find out more about how cookies work, you can read the explanation on BBC WebWise or watch the video below. 

Why would you use Privacy Badger? 

To block those cookies of course. While not all cookies are 'evil' (the internet would not function without them), there are some that are trying to find out very personal information about you and track all that you do online. Privacy Badger helps you block those nasty trackers and make you more aware of your surfing behavior. You can then choose what you want to do with those trackers: completely block them, just allow them not to install any cookies or to allow them. Because sometimes there are websites you trust and that you do want to allow access to your data. 

Privacy Badger is a free tool and it will always stay that way. You will never suddenly have to pay a fee for it, what can be the case with other privacy tools. At the same time, you can be sure it won't suddenly stop working. Some of these kinds of tools are made by a sole person and when they run out of time, the project stops. Privacy Badger is made and maintained by a Foundation and they promise to continue supporting all of our online safety.  

How to use Privacy Badger

Surf to https://www.eff.org/privacybadger and press the Install button. This will install the plugin for the browser that you are using at that time. So if you're surfing to the webpage with Chrome, it will get installed in that one, but not in Firefox or Safari. 

Once it has been installed, you can just continue surfing on the web. When you're on a website, you might notice either a green check or a red box with a number on the top right of your browser. For example, this page of the Guardian has 8 cookies actively tracking me.

Click on the red box to learn more about the trackers and to set up if you want to block them. There are three options on the slider for every tracker:

1. Completely block a tracker. It can't install any cookies and not send any information about you. These are in red. You can slide the bar to the left for any service you want to block, for example if you want to keep Facebook from learning your identity. 
2. The yellow ones are cookies or trackers that are often necessary for a website to function. However, Privacy Badger will limit the information they can send back to the server. This is the option most used. 
3. When the bar is in green and there is a check, it means that this cookie is not sending back any information about you (yet). They are allowed to function. If you want to support a certain service, for example if you want Facebook to know everything about you, you can always slide the bar to green completely. 

The great part is that if you make any changes to these settings, Privacy Badger will remember it and become a smarter program. Everyday, it will learn more about how you want to keep your privacy safe. 

What to look out for.

No program can completely protect you from information being gathered about you. So you should still take great care before you share information about yourself online. Don't depend completely on a computer program. 

There is no app for smartphones or tablets. If you want to protect your privacy on a mobile device, you will need another service and these are often not free to use. 

Privacy Badger in Education

The discussion about privacy is a very urgent one. Talk to your pupils about how their information is being gathered and how they feel about that. The Privacy Badger tool can help visualise the different streams of information and how much they are really being tracked. A supporting plugin to help you visualise tracking for your students is the Lightbeam plugin for FireFox. They will be surprised!

You can help pupils set up and use tools to protect themselves, such as Privacy Badger or private messaging apps such as Signal.