Extension Watch: Beef up Privacy Protection with Decentraleyes for Firefox

Productivity Sauce

uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger make a perfect combo for protecting your privacy and combating annoying ads. But these extensions can't protect you against more insidious ways of tracking your activities and collecting personal data through content delivery networks (CDN). Enter Decentraleyes. This add-on acts as a local CDN by intercepting requests, finding the required resource and injecting it into the environment. While this may sound awfully technical, the add-on does its job behind the scenes, and it requires no configuration whatsoever. Install the add-on from Mozilla's official add-on repository, and you are done.

If you are curious whether Decentraleyes actually does anything, choose Tools -> Add-on, and press the Preferences button next to the Decentraleyes item. You should see the number of times the add-on intercepted requests to inject resources locally in the Counter for locally injected resources field. Keep in mind, though, that you need to visit a few sites that rely on CDNs for content distribution, before you can see any number in the field. Decentraleyes is released under the MPL 2.0 license, and the add-on's source code is available on GitHub.