San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released Privacy Badger 2.0—a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera with new upgrades to help protect shoppers from online tracking.

“If you or your family does holiday shopping on the Internet, it’s likely that advertisers and other data collectors are learning a lot about you and the things you are interested in buying,” said EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin, lead developer of Privacy Badger. “Privacy Badger 2.0 gives you more control over this data collection, spotting many of the sneaky trackers that follow you without your knowledge, and blocking them from transmitting information about you.”

Online trackers are embedded in images, scripts, or advertising on many webpages. Just visiting a page with a tracker can allow it collect a record of the page you are visiting and merge it with a database of what you visited before and after. One of the results of this tracking are the ads that seem to follow you around the web, reflecting your past browsing history. If Privacy Badger spots a tracker following you without your permission, it blocks all content from the tracker or screens out the tracking scripts or cookies.

Hundreds of thousands of users have already installed earlier releases of Privacy Badger. The new version allows you to import and export your data and preferences across browsers, allows for incognito mode, and has an improved experience with many more websites, along with many other upgrades.

“Neither you nor your loved ones should have to sacrifice your privacy to data miners in order to use the Internet,” said Quintin. “Installing Privacy Badger on your family’s computers is a practical and effective way to fight abuses in the online advertising industry, and make your family’s online experience safer and more secure.”

Privacy Badger works in tandem with the Do Not Track (DNT) policy. Users set the DNT flag in their browser settings or by installing Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger won’t block ads or third-party services that promise to honor all DNT requests.

For your free download of Privacy Badger:

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger