Section: New Software and Platforms

MyTrackingChoices

Keywords: Privacy - User control

Functional Description: This extension lets you control how you are being tracked on the Internet. It allows you to choose the categories (e.g., health, adult) of the websites where you don’t want to be tracked on. When you browse the web, your visited webpages will be categorized on the fly and, depending on your choices, the extension will block the trackers (webpage by webpage) or not.

Existing anti-tracking (Ghostery, Disconnect etc.) and ad-blocking (AdBlock Plus etc.) tools block almost ALL trackers and as a result, ads. This has a negative impact on the Internet economy because free services/content on the Internet are fuelled by ads. As a result, websites are starting to block access to their content if they detect use of Ad-blockers or they ask users to move to a subscription-based model (where users have to pay to get access to the website).

This extension is testing another approach: It is trying to find a trade-off between privacy and economy, that would allow users to protect their privacy while still accessing to free content.

It is based on the assumption that most people are not against advertisements, but want to keep control over their data. We believe that some sites are more sensitive than others. In fact, most people don’t want to be tracked on “sensitive” websites (for example related to religion, health,…), but don’t see any problem to be tracked on less sensitive ones (such as news, sport,…). This extension allows you to take control and specify which on which categories of sites you don’t want to be tracked on! Furthermore, the extension also gives you the option to block the trackers on specific websites.

• Contact: Claude Castelluccia

• URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/FR/firefox/addon/mytrackingchoices/