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.
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.
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.
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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.