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EFF’s DNT Policy and Privacy Badger

Faced with the failure of the W3C process, EFF devised a two-pronged strategy that would provide immediate self-defense for users against tracking, while simultaneously giving advertisers an incentive to stop non-consensual tracking.

First, EFF began work on a DNT policy of its own, based on stronger privacy criteria than would have been possible at the W3C. EFF's DNT policy requires that users who have turned on the DNT signal are not tracked without their clear and informed consent. Otherwise, it has strict limitations on what data can be collected and how long that data can be retained. (It also includes exceptions that respect the ordinary functionality of a site, that allow measures for security purposes and prevent fraud, and allow data analysis techniques that protect the anonymity of the users.) The policy was launched in August 2015 together with a coalition including software companies Disconnect and Adblock, analytics provider Mixpanel, the publisher Medium.com and search engine DuckDuckGo. In autumn 2015 Adzerk became the first advertising company to announce support for the policy.

And what if a website doesn't commit to honoring EFF's DNT policy? That's where the second prong of EFF's strategy comes in: a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, called Privacy Badger, which blocks tracking and enforces DNT even in the absence of voluntary industry compliance.

Privacy Badger works by watching for third party calls on websites, checking if they are present over multiple sites, and blocking them if they appear to be related to tracking. To the user, the most visible result is that ads end up being blocked, because most ads have a tracking component built in to them.

Despite this, Privacy Badger is not an adblocker, but rather a tracker blocker, intended to incentivize ad-tech companies to develop privacy-friendly forms of advertising. Whereas adblockers punish all publishers indiscriminately, Privacy Badger offers good actors the option of having their content (including ads) unblocked if they adopt EFF's DNT policy.

In other words, the Privacy Badger/DNT Policy mechanism offers publishers, advertisers and third parties access to a universe of users from which they are otherwise excluded, if they play fair, thus giving them an incentive to change their ways. EFF's goal is to persuade other content blockers to also block based on whether or not a website follows EFF's DNT policy and reward companies who commit to respecting users' privacy preferences.