murks

Privacy Badger is a nice browser extension developed by the EFF that prevents third party websites from tracking users. The EFF is also advocating a mechanism called Do Not Track (DNT) that is supposed to prevent advertisers from tracking users if the users do not wish to be tracked. DNT however is fundamentally broken because it relies on the cooperation of the advertisement industry. DNT is an opt-out mechanism where you tell the advertisers that you do not want to be tracked. The advertisers can simply ignore your wish. Similar mechanisms failed and even backfired in the offline world, they are not going to work on the web.

Most browsers nowadays have a setting that lets the user decide whether he wants to be tracked or not, or not send any DNT information at all. Privacy Badger ignores the user setting and sets it to 'I do not want to be tracked' each time firefox is started. This happens silently, they do not inform the user about this behaviour and it can not be changed.

I find this behaviour unacceptable and have disabled privacy badger in the meanwhile. I hope they will change it soon. Someone already opened a ticket on their bug tracker, please support it by adding a comment there. The same issue may exist in the chrome version of this extension.