Being able to surf the Internet with privacy is a very complicated task, if not impossible. Starting with giants such as Google or Amazon, most of the websites we visit on a daily basis usually have a code to identify and follow us wherever we go, collecting information and using it in order to know our tastes and interests and thus show us information that can be of interest, such as offers. Browsing the web privately has long since been in the background. However, with these extensions it is possible to recover a little of that privacy.
Google Chrome is the official Google browser. Although the core of this browser is open source (Chromium), the Google version has a series of components designed to identify and track the user wherever they navigate. And since many of these privacy functions cannot be deactivated, it is necessary to resort to additional extensions that help us increase this privacy as much as possible and thus be able to navigate safely.
Privacy Badger
This is one of the most important extensions to improve Chrome privacy that we can find in the Chrome Store. This extension has been developed by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) to block all third-party trackers that are loaded in our browser when we visit a website. In addition, it sends a Do Not Track request to all the websites we visit (although in practice this request is not of much use, since the websites tend to ignore it) and it even has very complex algorithms that can block a website if they detect detection systems. tracking impossible to block.
This extension has 3 levels of operation. The red color is responsible for blocking everything related to the tracker. Yellow allows browsing without blocking the trackers but does not send them any information. And green means it doesn’t block anything. These options are very useful when when blocking a specific crawler the web stops working.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
DuckDuckGo is one of the best private alternatives to Google. And, unsurprisingly, it has its own extension to help users protect their privacy when browsing the Internet. This extension has several shields that allow us to protect ourselves while visiting web pages:
- Block all hidden trackers on web pages and in advertising to prevent them from following us wherever we go.
- Increase the security level of web pages by forcing the use of encryption whenever possible by the ISP.
- It allows you to perform private searches through your search engine instead of resorting to other engines such as Google.
- It allows you to easily know the privacy policy of the websites we visit without having to read it thanks to a rating system.
This extension qualifies all the websites that we visit with a note from A to F depending on the degree of privacy and protection that the page offers us.
Privacy Guardr
Security and privacy threats are not always found on the websites we visit, but can sometimes be hidden within the extensions we have installed in the browser. Therefore, Privacy Guardr is an extension that is responsible for analyzing the permissions of all installed extensions and lets us know if any of them may pose a danger to our security or privacy.
HTTPS Everywhere
Today most web pages already use the HTTPS protocol by default. However, there are still thousands of websites that allow connecting via HTTP, sending all unencrypted traffic over the Internet and jeopardizing our security.
What HTTPS Everywhere does, another extension created by the EFF, is to force all websites to use the HTTPS protocol when we visit them, blocking all those that do not support such a secure connection. There are also websites that load parts of the page through HTTP, although the main domain does so through HTTPS. And this extension is capable of blocking these insecure parts of the websites.
Vanilla Cookie Manager
Browser cookies are very useful to authenticate us on a website, save the session and avoid having to be constantly logging on the websites we visit. However, many of these cookies usually carry a personal identifier, ID, which is used to track us wherever we go. And the truth is that web browsers don’t offer many options when it comes to allowing us to control these extensions.
Vanilla Cookie Manager is a cookie manager for Chrome that will allow us to easily manage a white list of allowed cookies, block all cookies by default and even delete them from time to time or manually when we visit a web page.
Privacy Cleaner
Yet another extension designed to help us control our privacy. This in particular is responsible for notifying us every time a website, and, above all, webapps, try to access our data. Privacy Cleaner, formerly known as MyPermissions, allows us to control all the permissions of these websites and thus be able to protect our privacy.
This extension allows us to scan most of our online accounts to find out which websites and apps have access to our data, filters the results based on the level of danger and allows us to clean everything with a few clicks to recover our privacy.
Unshorten.Link
Another problem for our security and our very common privacy is finding us with shortened URLs. These tend to be much better on websites and social networks when it comes to sharing links. However, we cannot know exactly what they hide if we click on them. Thanks to Unshorten.Link Chrome you will be able to easily expand all these shortened URLs and analyze them to let us know if the address is reliable or can hide a threat.
This extension is compatible with more than 300 URL shortening services, and is updated frequently.
Cleanup Data
Although Chrome allows us to erase all personal data to “clean up” our browser sessions, this option is not as handy as it should be, so in the end it is almost never used. Thanks to this extension we will be able to have much more at hand the cleaning functions of Chrome so that, with a click, we can erase the histories, the cache and the cookies of Chrome, eliminating all personal data and being able to use Chrome in a way more private, at least until all this data is regenerated.