Privacy Badger
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Swartz, Noah
Quintin, Cooper
In this talk EFF Technologist Noah Swartz will present Privacy Badger, EFF's new browser extension that automatically blocks both invisible trackers and spying ads. It is intended to be a minimal or zero-configuration option that most Internet users can use to prevent non-consensual third party collection of their reading habits from their everyday browser. Privacy Badger couples the recently developed HTTP Do Not Track opt-out header with a number of heuristics for classifying the behavior of third parties, to automatically determine which should be blocked, which are needed but should have cookies blocked, and which are safe from a privacy perspective. They will also talk about the current state of non-consensual tracking on the web, what methods are currently being used to track people and exploring what alternatives we can pursue.
 Hello, everyone. I am Noah Swartz. I am a staff technologist at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For those of you who don't know, the EFF is a nonprofit set in the U.S. which defends online digital civil liberties. We do a bunch of things. We do litigation, which is we fight court cases to try to affect free speech laws and civil liberty laws that deal with the digital realm. We do some activism. We will get people organized, write their congresspeople or other government officials to change the law. We also write a bunch of technology, which is the group that I am in. You may be familiar with our browser plugin HTTPS Everywhere, which redirects you to the HTTPS version of a given site. Our upcoming project, which is Let's Encrypt, which will be an automated certificate authority. Or our fingerprinting website, Panopticlick, which I will talk about later in this talk. I am here to talk to you about Privacy Badger, which is our newest browser extension. We released it last Thursday. But I want to remind everyone that I am a technologist at the EFF and I am not a lawyer, so I cannot give you legal advice, but feel free to ask me technology questions. So we're going to talk about browser tracking, how ubiquitous it is on the web and what a big problem it is, why your privacy matters, who's doing it, how are they doing it, and what you can do to protect yourself, which is where Privacy Badger will come in. So you may have noticed when you've loaded a website recently that not all of the content on that website came from one source. When you go to websites, there's a lot of third party information on these various websites. So basic things like images or sometimes CSS files can be stored on CDNs, so you get like a cached version of the website, or the images are cached closer to you, so they load faster. But also now we have things like web fonts, or you'll get like Google Maps tiles on a certain website, so you'll have some service that's being provided by a third party. A lot of websites use analytics engines where third parties sort of try to track what you're doing on a website to provide analytics about clicks on a single domain. On news articles, a very prevalent one are the sort of social media widgets. So share this on Facebook or tweet this link, and those images are being sourced by third parties. So when that loads, it goes to Facebook for the image of the Facebook share button, and it even loads JavaScript from Facebook. And then obviously the most noticeable if you're not running an ad blocker are ads. So when you go to the New York Times, it's got a bunch of ads, they're CNN.com, they all have a bunch of ads, and these are all served by third parties on the fly, often targeting you specifically. So people are doing real-time bids on these ads to make sure they're showing you the right one. So how is your browser being tracked? These requests can write and read cookies in your browser. So just like you would have a cookie for a login for Facebook or for Google, these third parties are writing a cookie to your browser when you go to the New York Times. So every ad service that loads an ad, every distinct one, goes up to your browser and it says, hey, do you have a cookie from us? We're double-click.net, do you have a double-click cookie? And if your browser doesn't, it says, okay, great. Now your user, you know, 7,438. And then the next time you go to a website that loads a double-click ad, it asks if you have a cookie and it says, oh, great, your user, 7,438. I remember that, you know, you were looking at these websites last week and they build up this big profile of you as you try, as you browse across different sites, anything where their third party is being loaded. But they can also use other sort of distinctive elements about your browser, such as this Canvas element in HTML5, which does stuff with your GPU to get a fingerprint. They can also write these things that are called super cookies, which are storage options in other libraries. So HTML5 has a local storage option and they can store things in that HTML5 local storage and then read it back when you go to other domains or you load the site again. And then in addition to having these trackers on visible ads, they have these things called tracking pixels, which are sort of one-by-one images that load and then serve these cookies as well. So even if you don't see a visible ad on a website, it's still possible for a third party to be tracking you. Obviously, this is a big business. Ads and tracking are everywhere on the web, but we've seen a big move recently from visible ads to this sort of tracking of users and monetizing of user data. So this is an image of the EFF Project Panopticlic where you can go to it and it will tell you how unique your browser looks to us. So it has a big database of browsers and information about them and then it checks your information against the other information on the browser and it tells you how unique you are. So this is me from earlier this morning and I am completely unique out of the five and a half million users who have ever gone to Panopticlic. So these are a bunch of ways that someone can figure out things about your browser, but imagine an advertiser doing that on a site with only a few of them, you're still probably unique out of all of the visitors to that site because most sites don't have five million unique visitors. And so this is the problem. This is what we want to prevent advertisers from being able to do so that you can browse the web anonymously and not be followed around. So the question is who is tracking you online? As I said, it's a bunch of advertisers, but it's also these sort of data aggregators. So Axiom on this list is just a data aggregator and they build up profiles of people and then other marketers can go up to them and ask for certain subsets of the population. They can say, you know, I want to look for single dads in the Denver area and Axiom will give them a big list of people to advertise to you. And that's the people who are selling your data. And then you see also Facebook is a big advertiser in addition to being a social media network. So when they're reading things about your browsing, especially on news sites, they're using that to sell to advertisers as well on your Facebook site. So the problem with these trackers is that they're all third parties. They're not the site you were trying to go to. So when you go to the New York Times, you expect New York Times content to be served to you. And when you go to Facebook, maybe you expect Facebook to track things about you on Facebook, but not on other sites. And so a lot of these first party websites, you've probably at some point agreed to an user license agreement with them. You've clicked through some agreement. So at least there's sort of a standard of what you expect them to do with your data, whether or not you read it or you understand it, or if it's even reasonable. But at least there's something there. For these third party trackers, there's nothing. You've never agreed to their service, so they have this data on you, which they can use however they want. And you have no idea how they're going to use it. As I mentioned, it's completely ubiquitous. It's on basically every site that has some sort of social media button or some ad or probably an analytics engine. So it's all over, which makes it really hard to avoid. And these companies have very strong financial incentives to keep doing this. We can't just ask them politely to stop because they've built multi-billion dollar businesses on this. So you may say, oh, but I like targeted ads. I hate it when I get ads for things I don't care about. It's really nice to have targeted ads. But these third parties, as I said before, there's no rules that what they do with your information. So they don't need to anonymize it, and they can store it for however long they want. They can sell it to whoever they want for whatever they want, and you have no idea what they have and what they're going to do with it. So it's completely out of your control, which is scary enough to me, especially when advertisers have gotten into hot water previously with selling data to the US military to search for terrorists. But you can imagine someone hacking one of these databases and getting a lot of information about you. And then they can also misuse this targeted advertising for a bunch of things. So there's two pictures at the bottom. One is a Wall Street Journal article about how the office supply store staples was finding people who were close to their competitor, OfficeMax, and offering them better prices if they clicked through one of these ads that was targeted specifically based on their location. And maybe you don't care about office supplies, but you can imagine it being for something higher stakes, and you can imagine it being something more fine-grained than location. So we have this like two-tiered or multi-tiered system where advertisers are giving different people way different versions of their websites based on all this tracking data. And then the second image is from this report about the housing crash, the subprime loan crash in the US around 2008. And these advertisers went out and they wanted to direct market to people who hadn't bought mortgages before. And so they used all this data to find people in communities that didn't have mortgage lenders, and they specifically targeted them with online mortgage ads. And it turned out that these were the people selling the subprime loans. And it turns out that the people who lived in areas that didn't have brick and mortar places to get loans were people in the African-American community in the US. So they got sold all these subprime loans, and when the housing market crashed, they all lost their houses. So it disproportionately affected a very serious group of people in the US. So even if you're not concerned about the effects of targeted advertising on you, I think it's easy to see that it can have really bad effects for society if it's unstoppable. But don't worry, it's not just advertisers who are happily reading these cookies. It is also the NSA and lots of other spying organizations. Many of these tracking cookies are transmitted over HTTP. They're not encrypted, and anyone in between you and the advertiser's server gets to read all this information, including your unique ID for that website. So if you look at some of the slides the NSA has, they're very excited about these cookies. This is an actual NSA slide where they're just like, yes, cookies. And they break it down and it says, you know, you have a unique identifier for a person that's distinct from their IP address, and we can use it to correlate their traffic between multiple things. So even if you move around and the NSA gets your X-key score, like collects things in X-key score between multiple browsing sessions of you, as long as your browser hasn't been cleared and you're going to the same websites, you're going to send this HTTP cookie with this advertising unique ID, and then the NSA just knows it's you again without having to do any extra work. And so they talk very happily about this Yahoo ID, which apparently has a machine identifying identifier in it. So, or a cookie with a machine identifying ID in it. So it doesn't matter where you are or how much you clear your browser, the NSA is going to also get information about you. So these things scare me. This is why I think online targeted advertising is bad, and I don't think I need to convince all of you that privacy online is important, and there's been a lot of talk about the sort of chilling effects of knowing you're being monitored. So you may say, like, oh, I have nothing to hide, and then as soon as you want to go to a website that maybe is anti-authoritarian or possibly embarrassing, you're going to self-censor and not go to it because you know you're being tracked on all of these websites, which makes it very hard to go about life as you normally would without the fear of surveillance. So how can it be stopped? There's lots of ways people often propose for how to protect yourself from online tracking. A common one that I hear when I tell people about privacy badger is incognito mode. A lot of browsers have this incognito mode where they won't store information between sessions. You'll have these cookies temporarily for a specific browser session, and then it will clear them when you close your browser. But that only protects you between sessions, right? So if I leave that session open for a long time or I go to a lot of websites in that session, you can still correlate at that time because it's not reading cookies. It's just not storing them between sessions. I went to the New York Times, and then I went to, you know, like an AIDS policy website, and they had the same CDN or the same tracking pixels on them. Then, you know, the NSA would know that I'm at both of them in this advertiser would, and maybe it gets sold to Axiom, et cetera. And incognito mode is also hard because it's very cumbersome on you because all your first-party cookies get wiped between browsers. So if you use a lot of web services like Gmail or Facebook, you have to log in every time, which becomes very cumbersome, which makes people only use incognito mode when they're looking at these sort of sites that they don't want people to see. So their normal browsing history is still getting captured by these advertisers. And it's still vulnerable to fingerprinting. They can still fingerprint your machine. They can read your fonts and stuff like that. Or there are some zombie cookies where your Internet service provider might inject something into your web request header and then they'll remember to resurrect a cookie that you were given previously. Tor browser solves a lot of these issues. And it's great for private browsing. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't use it all the time. So, and it's not yet sort of a scalable solution for everyone. So I think there still need to be tools that protect people, you know, a normal person who isn't willing to use Tor from this online tracking. Ad blockers are another thing people use a lot. But ad blockers are typically focused on visible ads. So they don't necessarily block these invisible trackers. And often, they'll not block the request to the ad server. They'll delete it from the DOM after it's loaded. So this cookie stuff will still get sent between them. And they work on a blacklist. They have a big list of things that they think are ads and advertisers, you know, sort of read this list and they make ads that get around this. And it's sort of this arms race where, you know, they'll blacklist something and advertiser will do something new and they'll blocklist something out. And there's no way out for advertisers. There's no way that they can stop being blocked by these ad blockers. And sometimes these ad blockers have a financial incentive and they're not always trustworthy. So ad block plus will take sometimes take donations from advertisers to allow their ads through their blacklist. Ghostry by default sells information about what ads you're blocking back to the advertisers so they know what are the sort of creepy ads that people are afraid of. People have done some policy work on this. The W3C adopted a do not track standards. You can send a header with your web request saying that you don't want to be tracked. But unfortunately, no advertisers really honor this. You can send it to the advertisers all you want. They're not going to do anything. They're still going to track you. And it hasn't really been adopted by anyone. So we would like to see a world where it can be adopted by people and you don't have to install a third party extension to have advertisers honor your request not to be tracked. The advertisers seeing an opening formed the digital advertisers alliance where they're like, oh, it was really hard for the W3C to regulate us. Let us regulate ourselves. You just tell us you want to opt out and we'll happily stop showing you targeted advertisements. But we won't anonymize your data and we won't stop tracking you. We just won't show you the targeted ads. So that's not really a solution either and it's not legally binding. And even this very lack standard has only been limitedly adopted. So the FF thinks we have a solution. We have come up with privacy badger which was released last Thursday. I will tell you what it does and I will try to explain the name to you. So here is the privacy badger that's it celebrating its 1.0 release in our office in San Francisco. It is the reason it is named privacy badger. And what it is is a Chrome and Firefox extension that tries to block all tracking. Automatically through an algorithm rather than having a blacklist and the idea is to make it very easy for people to use and to not break the web as your browsing. So it's very low friction. It's GPLv3. You're welcome to submit pull requests but I will get to that later. And so we also think we have a way to solve this arms race problem which is also coming up. So how it works is it has your browser send this do not track it along with all of your requests and then it watches and sees what third party you are loading on a given site. If that third party is doing something to try to track you, we will add it to a list and if we see it across multiple first party domains, we will block it. So if you go to a website like the New York Times, you may get all these ads that are third parties that you might expect to see on other websites. But you might also get all the New York Times CDNs being loaded to load images for the New York Times. So if you go to CNN.com and you go to maybe Gawker and these ads are all three of them, you will see the ads across three domains and privacy page will block it but it won't block any of their specific CDNs. So here is an image of it on New York Times and all of these New York Times CDNs are white listed because you haven't seen them on any other site. So you have a little slider that goes from red to yellow to green. Red means it is blocking the request, yellow means it is anonymizing it by preventing cookies from being red or written and green means it is being let through untouched. Which is what you would hope for the images on New York Times.com. And so we want to block high entropy cookies that can uniquely identify you like we showed in the PanoptiClick thing. If it has enough bits of entropy to identify you out of the entire population of the world or all the people who might go to that website, then that is a cookie we want to block and we want to mark as a tracking cookie. So we also want to make it sort of seamless. So there are a lot of things that might get blocked because they look like trackers but they aren't. And so we have a gray list of domains that we will only set to be anonymized but we will still let the content through. And these are things like the Creative Commons button or like Google Fonts and stuff like that that might break websites or make web browsing really difficult. So the things we detect, as I said, are cookies from HTTP and JavaScript, HTML5 super cookies and this canvas fingerprinting where they read the HTML5 canvas element. So this is privacy badger on boing boing.net and you can see some things are green and the yellow things are things that allow the site to exist. So fonts.google and this Creative Commons thing. But here it is on Gawker and you see all these advertisers are being blocked and then Kinja, which is Gawker CDN, is being allowed because you would only see it on Gawker. So in addition to all of its automated settings, you as a user have complete control over it. You can override any of these settings either for the whole top level domain or for any specific sub domain of it. You can disable privacy badger entirely for a site if the site is not working because of privacy badger. We also do sort of click to play on things that you might want but that are getting blocked by privacy badger. For example, all the comments on YouTube are Google plus. So there is sort of this warning when you click it, it says would you like to enable it just for this website so that you can comment on YouTube. So here are some pictures. The left is privacy badger disable on a site and you see the icons grayed out and there is no information about the trackers and then on the right are some things that I have set and the little arrow allows it to revert control to what privacy badger was expecting to do for that domain. So you can kind of use it to debug a site or to block something if you think it is a tracker and privacy badger hasn't flagged it as such. Also we block these social widgets, the little Facebook like buttons on websites. So here is a picture from an article talking about Eurovision and you can see they have this little privacy badger icon. So it doesn't load the image from the third party. It has a local version that it sources and I think you can click to play and it will re-enable it. But by default you won't be leaking information through the use. So what about third parties that aren't tracking users? Well, they can agree to the EFF's new DNT policy that we just released. You can read it at EFF.org slash DNT hyphen policy but sites can host it and legally agree to follow what it says and then you will have a guarantee that your data is not being personally identified on their servers and you can know that they are not tracking you. So it says things like they won't start identifying information about you, no unique IDs for users, so it will all be anonymized, they can keep it for a little bit amount of time, so they can store a log of aggregate data but it's not identifying to any specific user. And I think the limit is very short. They are allowed to do debug and security things but they won't sell any of this data to people without ensuring that they also agree to this DUNO track policy. And then sites that adopt it, your privacy voucher will check before it blocks this domain and it will whitelist it. So here is an image where I can't read the things from here but do not tracker.org has posted the DNT policy so privacy voucher is respecting it and not blocking the domain whereas like evil tracker.com is being blocked because it is an evil tracker. And so this is an upcoming improvement to our Panopticlic site where you can test your browser for a tracker blocker. So soon it is not yet released but it will look like that. So we drafted this in conjunction with disconnect which is for public good company in California and we got adoption from mixed panel which is like an analysis engine, medium which is a poster of articles and ad block plus which is a different ad blocker. And I think we have about half a million users covered through these four companies who will now get the benefits of these DUNO track opt outs but hopefully more people will agree to it especially the sort of advertisers or online trackers. So that is privacy voucher and I hope you all install it. I have a few more things to say but you should go to EFF.org and install privacy voucher and protect yourself from online trackers. There is still some work to be done. There is many more things we could detect. We could have a nicer UI. We have localized it into four languages but we could always use more languages. We would like to see more people adopt our DNT policy. You can help by using privacy voucher and reporting broken sites. There is a thing you can click and report sites that are broken. You can submit bug reports on our GitHub or make pull requests if you are a developer. Or if you run a website you can respect people who send the DNT flag or the DNT header and you can also host our DNT policy at a dot well known address. But browsers can also do things to protect against tracking. We would like to see more browsers adopt these so that you don't need extensions. Firefox has been working on this tracking protection thing and we hope to see it released soon. But yeah, I think I am out of time. So that is privacy voucher and hopefully you all now know how to protect yourself from online tracking. Oh, and I have stickers. So if you want some privacy voucher stickers, come find me afterwards. Sounds good. We still have about three minutes left for questions. So line up at the microphones. And I think we will do the right one from here first. We have one tiny correction actually. It is not Adblock Plus but Adblock who are implementing the DNT policy. Of course we would love Adblock Plus to do it too. Thank you. So, yeah, are these do not track policies audited or verified in any way? Yeah. So EFF posts one on its website and privacy voucher has a list of hashes of acceptable ones. And then when the website hosts it, privacy voucher checks the hash that has locally against the hash of the one hosted on the remote website. And if they match then... No. I mean like if the website claims it does not keep logs, like is that verified? Like do they have to open their logs? Because if not, if I would be evil tracker, I would just say, yeah, yeah, no logs. No, no, no, we are a good tracker. The idea is that they could be sued for all the users that they disrespect with regards to this. And advertisers have expressed that they are very concerned about these sort of like market policies. But we don't necessarily have a way to compel them to give us information. Thank you. So the other microphone please. Yeah, I have a related question. If you white list or in this case green list, a tracking aside based on the fact that they claim to respect the do not track policy, do you give it to the user a visual difference that it's based on the policy and not because they're not using cookies? Sorry, I didn't... Now it is green if they don't use cookies at all and then it's yellow if you load it anyhow. So if a site is using cookies but you white listed because of the policy, is it then the same kind of green that is now cookies or is there a visible difference that you say, okay, but it was white listed? Yeah, it shows this little dnt image. Yeah, here. You see this little dnt image and you know that they've posted the do not track policy. And then it shows that it's sort of like set by privacy better and you can refer to it or overwrite it. So next question please. Yeah, hello. I've been using various ad blockers and privacy based browser extensions for forks of the Firefox web browser for several years. And recently I've been stumbled upon a fork or a version of you matrix that has been ported over from the chromium slash Chrome based browser world by Ryan Gore Hill. And I find that user interface to be very impressive for how much fine grain control it gives you to block cookies, JavaScript, CSS, images, what have you from different domains on the page? And I'm wondering if anybody at the EFF has looked at the user interface of this extension to compare how they implement privacy protection? I have not. But one of the things we wanted to do in privacy better is make it very easy to use so that someone who didn't really understand all the mechanics of the web could still protect themselves in a reasonable way. And I've heard a lot of praise for the sliders, but we're definitely always looking for new ways to express these things. So I will go look at you matrix. Yes, please do. And thank you for your work. Yeah. So any more questions? Doesn't look so. So thank you very much for your talk for showing us the privacy better. This is your applause.
 Hello, everyone. I am Noah Swartz. I am a staff technologist at the EFF, the Electronic  Frontier Foundation. For those of you who don't know, the EFF is a nonprofit set in  the U.S. which defends online digital civil liberties. We do a bunch of things. We do litigation,  which is we fight court cases to try to affect free speech laws and civil liberty laws that  deal with the digital realm. We do some activism. We will get people organized, write their  congresspeople or other government officials to change the law. We also write a bunch of  technology, which is the group that I am in. You may be familiar with our browser plugin  HTTPS Everywhere, which redirects you to the HTTPS version of a given site. Our upcoming  project, which is Let's Encrypt, which will be an automated certificate authority. Or  our fingerprinting website, Panopticlick, which I will talk about later in this talk. I am  here to talk to you about Privacy Badger, which is our newest browser extension. We released  it last Thursday. But I want to remind everyone that I am a technologist at the EFF and I  am not a lawyer, so I cannot give you legal advice, but feel free to ask me technology  questions. So we're going to talk about browser tracking, how ubiquitous it is on the web  and what a big problem it is, why your privacy matters, who's doing it, how are they doing  it, and what you can do to protect yourself, which is where Privacy Badger will come in.  So you may have noticed when you've loaded a website recently that not all of the content  on that website came from one source. When you go to websites, there's a lot of third  party information on these various websites. So basic things like images or sometimes CSS  files can be stored on CDNs, so you get like a cached version of the website, or the images  are cached closer to you, so they load faster. But also now we have things like web fonts,  or you'll get like Google Maps tiles on a certain website, so you'll have some service  that's being provided by a third party. A lot of websites use analytics engines where  third parties sort of try to track what you're doing on a website to provide analytics about  clicks on a single domain. On news articles, a very prevalent one are the sort of social  media widgets. So share this on Facebook or tweet this link, and those images are being  sourced by third parties. So when that loads, it goes to Facebook for the image of the Facebook  share button, and it even loads JavaScript from Facebook. And then obviously the most  noticeable if you're not running an ad blocker are ads. So when you go to the New York Times,  it's got a bunch of ads, they're CNN.com, they all have a bunch of ads, and these are  all served by third parties on the fly, often targeting you specifically. So people are  doing real-time bids on these ads to make sure they're showing you the right one.  So how is your browser being tracked? These requests can write and read cookies in your  browser. So just like you would have a cookie for a login for Facebook or for Google, these  third parties are writing a cookie to your browser when you go to the New York Times.  So every ad service that loads an ad, every distinct one, goes up to your browser and  it says, hey, do you have a cookie from us? We're double-click.net, do you have a double-click  cookie? And if your browser doesn't, it says, okay, great. Now your user, you know, 7,438.  And then the next time you go to a website that loads a double-click ad, it asks if you  have a cookie and it says, oh, great, your user, 7,438. I remember that, you know, you  were looking at these websites last week and they build up this big profile of you as you  try, as you browse across different sites, anything where their third party is being  loaded. But they can also use other sort of distinctive elements about your browser,  such as this Canvas element in HTML5, which does stuff with your GPU to get a fingerprint.  They can also write these things that are called super cookies, which are storage options  in other libraries. So HTML5 has a local storage option and they can store things in that HTML5  local storage and then read it back when you go to other domains or you load the site again.  And then in addition to having these trackers on visible ads, they have these things called  tracking pixels, which are sort of one-by-one images that load and then serve these cookies  as well. So even if you don't see a visible ad on a website, it's still possible for a  third party to be tracking you. Obviously, this is a big business. Ads and tracking are  everywhere on the web, but we've seen a big move recently from visible ads to this sort  of tracking of users and monetizing of user data. So this is an image of the EFF Project  Panopticlic where you can go to it and it will tell you how unique your browser looks  to us. So it has a big database of browsers and information about them and then it checks  your information against the other information on the browser and it tells you how unique  you are. So this is me from earlier this morning and I am completely unique out of the five  and a half million users who have ever gone to Panopticlic. So these are a bunch of ways  that someone can figure out things about your browser, but imagine an advertiser doing that  on a site with only a few of them, you're still probably unique out of all of the visitors  to that site because most sites don't have five million unique visitors. And so this  is the problem. This is what we want to prevent advertisers from being able to do so that  you can browse the web anonymously and not be followed around. So the question is who  is tracking you online? As I said, it's a bunch of advertisers, but it's also these  sort of data aggregators. So Axiom on this list is just a data aggregator and they build  up profiles of people and then other marketers can go up to them and ask for certain subsets  of the population. They can say, you know, I want to look for single dads in the Denver  area and Axiom will give them a big list of people to advertise to you. And that's the  people who are selling your data. And then you see also Facebook is a big advertiser  in addition to being a social media network. So when they're reading things about your  browsing, especially on news sites, they're using that to sell to advertisers as well  on your Facebook site. So the problem with these trackers is that they're all third parties.  They're not the site you were trying to go to. So when you go to the New York Times,  you expect New York Times content to be served to you. And when you go to Facebook, maybe  you expect Facebook to track things about you on Facebook, but not on other sites. And  so a lot of these first party websites, you've probably at some point agreed to an user license  agreement with them. You've clicked through some agreement. So at least there's sort of  a standard of what you expect them to do with your data, whether or not you read it or you  understand it, or if it's even reasonable. But at least there's something there. For  these third party trackers, there's nothing. You've never agreed to their service, so they  have this data on you, which they can use however they want. And you have no idea how  they're going to use it. As I mentioned, it's completely ubiquitous. It's on basically every  site that has some sort of social media button or some ad or probably an analytics engine.  So it's all over, which makes it really hard to avoid. And these companies have very strong  financial incentives to keep doing this. We can't just ask them politely to stop because  they've built multi-billion dollar businesses on this. So you may say, oh, but I like targeted  ads. I hate it when I get ads for things I don't care about. It's really nice to have  targeted ads. But these third parties, as I said before, there's no rules that what  they do with your information. So they don't need to anonymize it, and they can store it  for however long they want. They can sell it to whoever they want for whatever they  want, and you have no idea what they have and what they're going to do with it. So it's  completely out of your control, which is scary enough to me, especially when advertisers  have gotten into hot water previously with selling data to the US military to search  for terrorists. But you can imagine someone hacking one of these databases and getting  a lot of information about you. And then they can also misuse this targeted advertising  for a bunch of things. So there's two pictures at the bottom. One is a Wall Street Journal  article about how the office supply store staples was finding people who were close  to their competitor, OfficeMax, and offering them better prices if they clicked through  one of these ads that was targeted specifically based on their location. And maybe you don't  care about office supplies, but you can imagine it being for something higher stakes, and  you can imagine it being something more fine-grained than location. So we have this like two-tiered  or multi-tiered system where advertisers are giving different people way different versions  of their websites based on all this tracking data. And then the second image is from this  report about the housing crash, the subprime loan crash in the US around 2008. And these  advertisers went out and they wanted to direct market to people who hadn't bought mortgages  before. And so they used all this data to find people in communities that didn't have  mortgage lenders, and they specifically targeted them with online mortgage ads. And it turned  out that these were the people selling the subprime loans. And it turns out that the  people who lived in areas that didn't have brick and mortar places to get loans were  people in the African-American community in the US. So they got sold all these subprime  loans, and when the housing market crashed, they all lost their houses. So it disproportionately  affected a very serious group of people in the US. So even if you're not concerned about  the effects of targeted advertising on you, I think it's easy to see that it can have  really bad effects for society if it's unstoppable. But don't worry, it's not just advertisers  who are happily reading these cookies. It is also the NSA and lots of other spying organizations.  Many of these tracking cookies are transmitted over HTTP. They're not encrypted, and anyone  in between you and the advertiser's server gets to read all this information, including  your unique ID for that website. So if you look at some of the slides the NSA has, they're  very excited about these cookies. This is an actual NSA slide where they're just like,  yes, cookies. And they break it down and it says, you know, you have a unique identifier  for a person that's distinct from their IP address, and we can use it to correlate their  traffic between multiple things. So even if you move around and the NSA gets your X-key  score, like collects things in X-key score between multiple browsing sessions of you,  as long as your browser hasn't been cleared and you're going to the same websites, you're  going to send this HTTP cookie with this advertising unique ID, and then the NSA just knows it's  you again without having to do any extra work. And so they talk very happily about this Yahoo  ID, which apparently has a machine identifying identifier in it. So, or a cookie with a machine  identifying ID in it. So it doesn't matter where you are or how much you clear your browser,  the NSA is going to also get information about you. So these things scare me. This is why  I think online targeted advertising is bad, and I don't think I need to convince all of  you that privacy online is important, and there's been a lot of talk about the sort  of chilling effects of knowing you're being monitored. So you may say, like, oh, I have  nothing to hide, and then as soon as you want to go to a website that maybe is anti-authoritarian  or possibly embarrassing, you're going to self-censor and not go to it because you know  you're being tracked on all of these websites, which makes it very hard to go about life as  you normally would without the fear of surveillance. So how can it be stopped? There's lots of  ways people often propose for how to protect yourself from online tracking. A common one  that I hear when I tell people about privacy badger is incognito mode. A lot of browsers  have this incognito mode where they won't store information between sessions. You'll  have these cookies temporarily for a specific browser session, and then it will clear them  when you close your browser. But that only protects you between sessions, right? So if  I leave that session open for a long time or I go to a lot of websites in that session,  you can still correlate at that time because it's not reading cookies. It's just not  storing them between sessions. I went to the New York Times, and then I went to, you know,  like an AIDS policy website, and they had the same CDN or the same tracking pixels on  them. Then, you know, the NSA would know that I'm at both of them in this advertiser  would, and maybe it gets sold to Axiom, et cetera. And incognito mode is also hard because  it's very cumbersome on you because all your first-party cookies get wiped between browsers.  So if you use a lot of web services like Gmail or Facebook, you have to log in every time,  which becomes very cumbersome, which makes people only use incognito mode when they're  looking at these sort of sites that they don't want people to see. So their normal browsing  history is still getting captured by these advertisers. And it's still vulnerable to  fingerprinting. They can still fingerprint your machine. They can read your fonts and  stuff like that. Or there are some zombie cookies where your Internet service provider  might inject something into your web request header and then they'll remember to resurrect  a cookie that you were given previously. Tor browser solves a lot of these issues. And  it's great for private browsing. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't use it all the time.  So, and it's not yet sort of a scalable solution for everyone. So I think there still need  to be tools that protect people, you know, a normal person who isn't willing to use Tor  from this online tracking. Ad blockers are another thing people use a lot. But ad blockers  are typically focused on visible ads. So they don't necessarily block these invisible trackers.  And often, they'll not block the request to the ad server. They'll delete it from the  DOM after it's loaded. So this cookie stuff will still get sent between them. And they  work on a blacklist. They have a big list of things that they think are ads and advertisers,  you know, sort of read this list and they make ads that get around this. And it's sort  of this arms race where, you know, they'll blacklist something and advertiser will do  something new and they'll blocklist something out. And there's no way out for advertisers.  There's no way that they can stop being blocked by these ad blockers. And sometimes these  ad blockers have a financial incentive and they're not always trustworthy. So ad block  plus will take sometimes take donations from advertisers to allow their ads through their  blacklist. Ghostry by default sells information about what ads you're blocking back to the  advertisers so they know what are the sort of creepy ads that people are afraid of. People  have done some policy work on this. The W3C adopted a do not track standards. You can  send a header with your web request saying that you don't want to be tracked. But unfortunately,  no advertisers really honor this. You can send it to the advertisers all you want. They're  not going to do anything. They're still going to track you. And it hasn't really been adopted  by anyone. So we would like to see a world where it can be adopted by people and you  don't have to install a third party extension to have advertisers honor your request not  to be tracked. The advertisers seeing an opening formed the digital advertisers alliance where  they're like, oh, it was really hard for the W3C to regulate us. Let us regulate ourselves.  You just tell us you want to opt out and we'll happily stop showing you targeted advertisements.  But we won't anonymize your data and we won't stop tracking you. We just won't show you  the targeted ads. So that's not really a solution either and it's not legally binding. And even  this very lack standard has only been limitedly adopted. So the FF thinks we have a solution.  We have come up with privacy badger which was released last Thursday. I will tell you what  it does and I will try to explain the name to you. So here is the privacy badger that's  it celebrating its 1.0 release in our office in San Francisco. It is the reason it is named  privacy badger. And what it is is a Chrome and Firefox extension that tries to block  all tracking. Automatically through an algorithm rather than having a blacklist and the idea  is to make it very easy for people to use and to not break the web as your browsing.  So it's very low friction. It's GPLv3. You're welcome to submit pull requests but I will  get to that later. And so we also think we have a way to solve this arms race problem  which is also coming up. So how it works is it has your browser send this do not track  it along with all of your requests and then it watches and sees what third party you are  loading on a given site. If that third party is doing something to try to track you, we  will add it to a list and if we see it across multiple first party domains, we will block  it. So if you go to a website like the New York Times, you may get all these ads that  are third parties that you might expect to see on other websites. But you might also  get all the New York Times CDNs being loaded to load images for the New York Times. So  if you go to CNN.com and you go to maybe Gawker and these ads are all three of them,  you will see the ads across three domains and privacy page will block it but it won't  block any of their specific CDNs. So here is an image of it on New York Times and all  of these New York Times CDNs are white listed because you haven't seen them on any other  site. So you have a little slider that goes from red to yellow to green. Red means it  is blocking the request, yellow means it is anonymizing it by preventing cookies from  being red or written and green means it is being let through untouched. Which is what  you would hope for the images on New York Times.com. And so we want to block high entropy  cookies that can uniquely identify you like we showed in the PanoptiClick thing. If it  has enough bits of entropy to identify you out of the entire population of the world  or all the people who might go to that website, then that is a cookie we want to block and  we want to mark as a tracking cookie. So we also want to make it sort of seamless.  So there are a lot of things that might get blocked because they look like trackers but  they aren't. And so we have a gray list of domains that we will only set to be anonymized  but we will still let the content through. And these are things like the Creative Commons  button or like Google Fonts and stuff like that that might break websites or make web  browsing really difficult. So the things we detect, as I said, are cookies from HTTP  and JavaScript, HTML5 super cookies and this canvas fingerprinting where they read the  HTML5 canvas element. So this is privacy badger on boing boing.net and you can see some things  are green and the yellow things are things that allow the site to exist. So fonts.google  and this Creative Commons thing. But here it is on Gawker and you see all these advertisers  are being blocked and then Kinja, which is Gawker CDN, is being allowed because you would  only see it on Gawker. So in addition to all of its automated settings, you as a user  have complete control over it. You can override any of these settings either for the whole  top level domain or for any specific sub domain of it. You can disable privacy badger entirely  for a site if the site is not working because of privacy badger. We also do sort of click  to play on things that you might want but that are getting blocked by privacy badger.  For example, all the comments on YouTube are Google plus. So there is sort of this warning  when you click it, it says would you like to enable it just for this website so that  you can comment on YouTube. So here are some pictures. The left is privacy badger disable  on a site and you see the icons grayed out and there is no information about the trackers  and then on the right are some things that I have set and the little arrow allows it  to revert control to what privacy badger was expecting to do for that domain. So you can  kind of use it to debug a site or to block something if you think it is a tracker and  privacy badger hasn't flagged it as such. Also we block these social widgets, the little  Facebook like buttons on websites. So here is a picture from an article talking about  Eurovision and you can see they have this little privacy badger icon. So it doesn't  load the image from the third party. It has a local version that it sources and I think  you can click to play and it will re-enable it. But by default you won't be leaking information  through the use. So what about third parties that aren't tracking users? Well, they can  agree to the EFF's new DNT policy that we just released. You can read it at EFF.org  slash DNT hyphen policy but sites can host it and legally agree to follow what it says  and then you will have a guarantee that your data is not being personally identified on  their servers and you can know that they are not tracking you. So it says things like they  won't start identifying information about you, no unique IDs for users, so it will all be  anonymized, they can keep it for a little bit amount of time, so they can store a log  of aggregate data but it's not identifying to any specific user. And I think the limit  is very short. They are allowed to do debug and security things but they won't sell any  of this data to people without ensuring that they also agree to this DUNO track policy.  And then sites that adopt it, your privacy voucher will check before it blocks this domain  and it will whitelist it. So here is an image where I can't read the things from here but  do not tracker.org has posted the DNT policy so privacy voucher is respecting it and not  blocking the domain whereas like evil tracker.com is being blocked because it is an evil tracker.  And so this is an upcoming improvement to our Panopticlic site where you can test your  browser for a tracker blocker. So soon it is not yet released but it will look like that.  So we drafted this in conjunction with disconnect which is for public good company in California  and we got adoption from mixed panel which is like an analysis engine, medium which is  a poster of articles and ad block plus which is a different ad blocker. And I think we  have about half a million users covered through these four companies who will now get the  benefits of these DUNO track opt outs but hopefully more people will agree to it especially  the sort of advertisers or online trackers. So that is privacy voucher and I hope you  all install it. I have a few more things to say but you should go to EFF.org and install  privacy voucher and protect yourself from online trackers. There is still some work  to be done. There is many more things we could detect. We could have a nicer UI. We have  localized it into four languages but we could always use more languages. We would like to  see more people adopt our DNT policy. You can help by using privacy voucher and reporting  broken sites. There is a thing you can click and report sites that are broken. You can  submit bug reports on our GitHub or make pull requests if you are a developer. Or if you  run a website you can respect people who send the DNT flag or the DNT header and you can  also host our DNT policy at a dot well known address. But browsers can also do things to  protect against tracking. We would like to see more browsers adopt these so that you  don't need extensions. Firefox has been working on this tracking protection thing and we hope  to see it released soon. But yeah, I think I am out of time. So that is privacy voucher  and hopefully you all now know how to protect yourself from online tracking.  Oh, and I have stickers. So if you want some privacy voucher stickers, come find me afterwards.  Sounds good. We still have about three minutes left for questions. So line up at the microphones.  And I think we will do the right one from here first.  We have one tiny correction actually. It is not Adblock Plus but Adblock who are implementing  the DNT policy. Of course we would love Adblock Plus to do it too.  Thank you. So, yeah, are these do not track policies audited or verified in any way?  Yeah. So EFF posts one on its website and privacy voucher has a list of hashes of acceptable  ones. And then when the website hosts it, privacy voucher checks the hash that has locally  against the hash of the one hosted on the remote website. And if they match then...  No. I mean like if the website claims it does not keep logs, like is that verified? Like  do they have to open their logs? Because if not, if I would be evil tracker, I would just  say, yeah, yeah, no logs. No, no, no, we are a good tracker.  The idea is that they could be sued for all the users that they disrespect with regards  to this. And advertisers have expressed that they are very concerned about these sort of  like market policies. But we don't necessarily have a way to compel them to give us information.  Thank you. So the other microphone please.  Yeah, I have a related question. If you white list or in this case green list, a tracking  aside based on the fact that they claim to respect the do not track policy, do you give  it to the user a visual difference that it's based on the policy and not because they're  not using cookies? Sorry, I didn't...  Now it is green if they don't use cookies at all and then it's yellow if you load it  anyhow. So if a site is using cookies but you white listed because of the policy, is  it then the same kind of green that is now cookies or is there a visible difference that  you say, okay, but it was white listed?  Yeah, it shows this little dnt image. Yeah, here. You see this little dnt image and you  know that they've posted the do not track policy. And then it shows that it's sort of  like set by privacy better and you can refer to it or overwrite it.  So next question please. Yeah, hello. I've been using various ad blockers and privacy  based browser extensions for forks of the Firefox web browser for several years. And  recently I've been stumbled upon a fork or a version of you matrix that has been ported  over from the chromium slash Chrome based browser world by Ryan Gore Hill. And I find  that user interface to be very impressive for how much fine grain control it gives you  to block cookies, JavaScript, CSS, images, what have you from different domains on the  page? And I'm wondering if anybody at the EFF has looked at the user interface of this  extension to compare how they implement privacy protection?  I have not. But one of the things we wanted to do in privacy better is make it very easy  to use so that someone who didn't really understand all the mechanics of the web could still protect  themselves in a reasonable way. And I've heard a lot of praise for the sliders, but we're  definitely always looking for new ways to express these things. So I will go look at  you matrix. Yes, please do. And thank you for your work.  Yeah. So any more questions? Doesn't look so. So thank you very much for your talk for  showing us the privacy better. This is your applause.
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