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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

I love it! By far the most important thing about Privacy Badger is that it's backed and controlled by the EFF, instead of some individual or business that might be tempted in the future to betray users for profits.[1]

[1] For example, consider what happened with Adblock Plus. For years, it blocked all ads, but then in 2011 its developer announced it would allow "acceptable ads" by advertisers who had partnered with Adblock Plus. (For the details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_a... ) The EFF is extremely unlikely ever to do something like that.

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The EFF is doing something similar, though I don't know if their standards are different than Adblock Plus':

"Advertisers and other third-party domains can unblock themselves in Privacy Badger by making a strong commitment to respect Do Not Track requests."

To be fair to EFF, it is explicit about what it considers that strong commitment to be: publishing this DNT policy notice on the domain:

https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy

Quote:

What does the dnt-policy.txt promise mean?

Posting the dnt-policy.txt file makes a promise to the users who interact with their domain. We [EFF] believe it would be a false and misleading trade practice to post the policy without the intent to comply in good faith. However, EFF is not in a position to enforce this promise or monitor compliance.

There is code in Privacy Badger that checks whether a site has publicly posted a statement of compliance with DNT before blocking it. If they do and then violate that commitment, we have a record of it and can call them out on it.

Can you still configure the plugin (manually) to not trust such sites?

I don't want it to be a negotiation between the EFF and a website as to the state of my privacy - I want the final say in who is going to be trusted.

As I understand it, yes, you would still have final control.

When you click on the plugin icon in the browser toolbar, a popup box displays all the trackers Privacy Badger has found. There is a slider next to each tracker, with three states, green, yellow and red. Red means blocked.

As Privacy Badger works, it moves the slider for a tracker when it notices it following you across domains. But you can still manually drag the slider across to Red if you want.

This seems different. Adblock's stated purpose was to block ads. They directly compromise this purpose by allowing companies to pay to be able to show adds. Privacy Badger's stated purpose is privacy. There is no direct contradiction in allowing third party domains to be unblocked if they are not going to violate privacy. The only question here is how strongly to we believe they will honer the DNT.

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