- Mar 29, 2018
- 7,044
This is an old reddit post about these two extensions, which I found to be the most in-depth explanation and comparison of Privacy Possum and Privacy Badger. I'm trying them both together for a while with Edge Dev's built-in tracking prevention feature to check performance, etc. Please be aware that this post preceded Privacy Badger's latest 2019 update with its claimed feature improvements. Let me know your thoughts.
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Hi! Privacy Badger dev here.
First of all, Privacy Badger doesn't send back any data to EFF automatically. The only time it contacts us at all is to download a new version of the yellowlist, once a day -- and that request doesn't contain any information about you at all. Of course, you can use the dialog within the extension to file an error report, but it should be pretty clear that you mean to contact us in that case. We don't do any kind of telemetry otherwise.
Privacy Possum is more of a complement to Privacy Badger than a replacement. It doesn't use the same heuristic-learning model that Badger does, and it doesn't usually block requests outright. Once Privacy Badger learns that a domain is a tracker, it will block all third-party traffic to that domain, which prevents harder-to-stop tracking methods like TLS session resumption. Privacy Badger also stops many ads from loading, since ad companies tend to be the biggest trackers. I believe Privacy Possum looks at every request individually and decides whether to take an action like stripping cookies or modifying headers. Privacy Possum blocks certain kinds of fingerprinting that Badger doesn't, yet, but we've found those methods to be quite rare in the wild.
Privacy Badger also offers several features that Possum doesn't, including link unwrapping on Facebook and Google, and widget replacement that stops things like Facebook like buttons from tracking you until you decide to click on them. PB lets you decide to block or allow individual domains, so you can customize your experience and debug issues on the fly. We're working on blocking tracking e-tags, too!
At the end of the day, they're different tools with different priorities. There are some things that Privacy Badger blocks that Possum won't, and vise versa, but I think both of the dev teams are trying our best to block as much tracking as possible without breaking the web. Try browsing with both installed and see how things go. If you want to go for completeness, I recommend using uBlock Origin as well.
I disagree with the commenter below who said it's better to have just one tool; in general, tracker blockers require minimal resources and any performance hits should be vastly outweighed by the performance (and privacy!) gains they provide. The biggest issue with installing multiple extensions is that it makes it harder to narrow down the culprit when a site breaks. I use both Privacy Badger and uBlock in my own browser. But if you do want to use just one tool, I still recommend Privacy Badger
Hope that helps!