MyTrackingChoices

[Please uninstall other Adblockers or disable blocking functionality in other anti-tracking extensions like Ghostery, DisConnect, PrivacyBadger etc. before installing MyTrackingChoices. Otherwise, your choices would not be completely respected.] 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 or 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 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. ===================== How does it work? ===================== After installing the extension, you need to configure your choice (by default, no categories are blocked). This is performed by clicking on “configure your tracking choices” option. You are then ready to go! Important notes: 1. Chrome extension currently supports Web-pages in English, French, Spanish and Italian. It will not correctly work for Web-pages in other languages. 2. MyTrackingChoices extension does not rely on lists of trackers and classifies a third-party domain as a tracker if it is present on 3 or more different domains you visited. This implies that the extension becomes fully functional only after you will visit a couple of sites (after installation). ============= FAQs ============= 1. How MyTrackingChoices is different from other anti-tracking tools? First, existing anti-tracking tools give users the option to decide by which entity they don't want to be tracked. However, we believe that most users are concerned with other dimension, i.e., where they don't want to be tracked. Also, this is easy for most users to understand and configure the categories of the websites that are sensitive to them instead of choosing what trackers they want to block. Therefore, we provide this option to users. Secondly, unlike other anti-tracking or ad-blocking tools, we don't block the network requests of all trackers right away because this has an effect on Internet economy. We let user choose the categories (health, religion) of Web-pages that are privacy-sensitive to them and block the trackers on those pages only. 2. Who are the developers of MyTrackingChoices? We are researchers at INRIA Privatics team located at Grenoble, France. The goals of the Privatics team is to study the new privacy threats introduced by the information society and design privacy-preserving solutions to prevent or at least mitigate them. The team follows a multidisciplinary approach. It focuses on technical and scientific problems, but also considers the economical, legal and social aspects of privacy.