As a privacy concious user (maybe a bit paranoid at times… but then again, I am a German, so that comes naturally), I have been thinking a lot lately about how to maintain control about which web company gets which information about me. After all, through the proliferation of facebook’s like-button an its relatives (Google+, Twitter et al.) and the advent of behavioral advertising, companies have the means to create browsing profiles and, in the case of those companies that offer social networks and advertising services, even tie it to my person and use it to serve advertisements to me even in totally different contexts. This is even more relevant since that tracking can even occur when I am not logged in to the social network in question, since e.g. facebook uses identifying cookies even in that case (see heise for more information, albeit in German).
In this article, I am going to evaluate a few add-ons for Mozilla Firefox that help maintain control over the data that is being shared, and discuss some of their pros and cons. Similar or the same add-ons might exist for Google Chrome or other browsers as well. The plugins I am going to discuss are the following:
- Ghostery
- BetterPrivacy
- NoScript
- Beef Taco
- AdBlock Plus (more…)