Privacy Trackers

Privacy Trackers are software, usually browser extensions, that prevent websites from tracking users. Websites, even websites the user isn't currently visiting, can use tracking cookies to track users for a multitude of reasons. Normally, users have no way to tell what websites are tracking them and to stop these websites from blocking them. Privacy trackers not only prevent this, but also tell users what websites are tracking them, and may give users some control over what websites the tracker blocks. (Brad, 2015)

Tracking
Websites can track users for several reasons. Some websites, like Facebook or Twitter, require tracking for basic functionalities like liking a post or retweeting a tweet. Otherwise, the most common reason for a website tracking a user is for personalized advertising. Tracking a user allows websites to see what kind of products they've looked at, what types of websites the user usually browses, and lets them try to gauge the user's interests and guess at what they'd be interested in looking at. The result of all this shows up in advertisements that the user sees, as long as they aren't blocking ads. (Heddings, 2014)

In most cases, a user wouldn't want to be tracked. Having your information collected by a website and stored is a scary thought, and most users are concerned with privacy. However, it's important to not just mindlessly block every website from tracking you. On websites that require tracking for basic functionality, you might find that website completely unusable.

Trackers
Privacy trackers find these websites tracking a user and disables tracking cookies from websites a user wouldn't want to be tracking them. Often, these trackers use filter lists to distinguish between acceptable and unwanted tracking cookies. They will usually display these websites to the user, and often allow a user to change whether a website is blocked or not. (Brad, 2015)

Commonly used privacy trackers include Disconnect, Collusion, Ghostery, and Privacy Badger. These trackers are all available as extensions on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. (Henry, 2012) (Hal9000, 2017).

Comparisons
User Overkill on MalwareTips created a poll asking other users which privacy tracker blocked the most trackers and was the most trustworthy. The choices given in the poll were Ghostery, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, and EasyPrivacy. 25 people participated in the poll. Ghostery won with 68% of the votes, and Privacy Badger had the least votes, at 0%. While this only offers the perspective of an extremely small subset of Internet users, it's a very interesting perspective to look at multiple people's ideas coming together, rather than one or two people writing an article about just their own perspective. (Overkill, 2014)

The New York Times took a look at the trackers Ghostery, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, and RedMorph, and compared them to each other. Rather than seeing how each app performed on some set of standards, each privacy tracker was tested and the pros and cons of each privacy tracker were given. Ghostery works by giving the user a list of third-party trackers and having the user select which ones the want to block. It was found that since this list is extremely long, that this was a very inconvenient feature. RedMorph, instead, blocks every tracker on the list by default and lets the user decide if they don't want to block a tracker. Privacy Badger determines who is tracking the user on a specific webpage and blocks the trackers it determines to be harmful, but lets the user alter whether a tracker is blocked if they choose. Disconnect predetermines which trackers are collecting or sharing the user's information and only blocks those trackers. In this case, Disconnect was determined to be the favorite privacy tracker because of its ease to use. (Chen and Singer, 2016)