Chrome is the world’s most commonly used web browser, but it is not the best in privacy-centric browsers. Chrome lags in providing effective in-built features to protect your privacy if compared with other privacy-centric browsers, like Firefox and Safari.
Until Chrome provides much-needed privacy protection features, below are the top five chrome privacy extensions that you can use:
1. Ghostery
When it comes to feature-rich and reliable privacy extensions, Ghostery is one such comprehensive and reliable privacy protection extension. It intelligently removes ads from a webpage, informs you to view and block trackers on websites, and speeds up your browser page loading time. It also provides custom blocking preferences and an intuitive user interface and dashboard.
2. Blur
Blur is a powerful extension for tracking, encrypting, and securing personal information. It provides multiple functionalities to its users. It acts as a password management extension, helping you create strong passwords for each online service you want to set up an account.
Secondly, it provides a protective layer between the sign-up service and you, masking your sensitive information, such as email address, credit card details, etc. Besides that, it also blocks dozens of sites and trackers that are trying to secretly collect data about you.
3. DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
DuckDuckGo is globally known for providing a search engine that does not track or store any of your search or personal data. In the past few years, the company has also turned its focus to help internet users have more control of their privacy.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is one such extension for Chrome designed to block invisible trackers, inform you about all those advertising platforms tracking you all over, and provide other much-needed privacy protection.4
4. Privacy Cleaner
Privacy Cleaner is meant to protect your sensitive personal information by giving you real-time alerts when apps/services access your information. It scans, tracks, and manages how services access your information online.
With the insights that Privacy Cleaner provides, you can remove or approve those websites and services from accessing your information. Besides that, you can remove apps’ permissions with just a single click.
5. Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger is another great extension for blocking online tracking effectively. It is developed by Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a non-profit digital-rights group fighting for online privacy issues for the past two decades.
Privacy Badger automatically identifies trackers from their behaviors and blocks all the invisible trackers. It monitors everything, from the plug-ins to ads that third-party companies have placed on the webpage. The organization narrates that it does not hold a list of what to block; instead, it tracks based on your browsing and becomes even better and more intelligent with time.
Chrome privacy improvements
Chrome has many privacy concerns associated with it that can somehow get addressed by privacy extensions. But that doesn’t mean Chrome isn’t improving itself. Recently, Chrome launched a password security feature that informs you if your username and password have been compromised due to a data breach on some third-party app or site.
If it reports a password, you should generate a new strong password. Chrome claims that your username and password are stored via a highly-encrypted mechanism, where the company itself doesn’t have access to your credentials. This feature is just a highlight of Chrome’s seriousness to privacy concerns, and we can expect more similar improvements with the passage of time.
