If you installed Privacy Badger and ads kept appearing, nothing is broken. Privacy Badger isn't an features" class="doc-internal-link">ad blocker. It was never meant to be one.

What it actually does

Privacy Badger, made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, blocks tracking behaviour. Not ads — the third-party scripts, pixels and cookies that follow you between sites building a profile.

The distinction is easy to miss because the two usually arrive together. An ad and the tracker measuring whether you looked at it are served by the same industry, often from the same domains. Block the tracker and the ad frequently disappears as a side effect. But that's a side effect, and where an ad is served without the tracking Privacy Badger objects to, it stays.

Two useful things about how it works today, because most write-ups still describe the old behaviour:

• It doesn't learn as you browse by default any more. That was the original design — watch which third parties appear across multiple sites, block the ones that look like they're following you. In 2020, Google's security team showed the learned state could itself become a fingerprinting signal, since your particular set of blocked domains is fairly distinctive. EFF turned local learning off by default in response.
• It ships a pre-trained list instead. Tracker definitions are built by EFF crawling the web and refreshed periodically, so you get the benefit of the learning without your browser carrying a unique record of it.

That decision is worth noticing on its own: they degraded their headline feature because outside researchers showed it could be turned against users. Not every project does that.

So should you replace it?

Usually not. EFF's own guidance is that Privacy Badger sits alongside a content blocker rather than instead of one, and that's the setup that actually solves the problem you have — the tracker blocker handles tracking, the ad blocker handles ads.

The one caveat, and it's a real one: on Chrome and Edge, installed extensions share a limited budget for blocking rules. Running several blocking extensions can leave each with fewer active rules than it would have had alone. If you do run a pair, it's worth checking in your ad blocker that its rule sets are still showing as active, rather than assuming more extensions means more coverage.

What to pair it with — or switch to

uBlock Origin

The usual answer, and it overlaps with Privacy Badger enough that many people run it alone. Free, open source, no company, no paid tier. On Chrome and Edge you get uBlock Origin Lite under Manifest V3, which is narrower — no dynamic filtering, no per-site rule editing. The full version still runs on Firefox, Brave and Opera; see which browsers still support it.

AdGuard

Free extension, paid system-wide apps. The apps cover tracking outside the browser too, which tends to appeal to the same people Privacy Badger appeals to.

DNDShield

We block ads, trackers and pop-ups together, which for most people is the simpler shape than running two extensions and hoping they don't collide over rule budget. Blocking is on the free plan. Our tracker rules come from EasyPrivacy and AdGuard's lists rather than from behavioural learning, so the approach is list-based, not adaptive like Privacy Badger's original design.

What we don't do: we're not a substitute for Privacy Badger's specific idea of catching trackers no list has named yet. A list-based blocker knows what's on its lists. If that heuristic is precisely why you use Privacy Badger, keep it — and read how fingerprinting works, since that's the tracking method lists struggle with most.

FAQ

Why doesn't Privacy Badger block ads? Because it isn't an ad blocker. EFF built it to block cross-site tracking, and ads that don't track you the way it objects to are left alone. Ads often vanish anyway, as a side effect of the tracker being blocked.

Should I use Privacy Badger and an ad blocker together? That's EFF's own recommendation. On Chrome and Edge, check afterwards that your ad blocker still reports its rules as active, since extensions there share a blocking-rule budget.

Does Privacy Badger still learn as I browse? Not by default. EFF disabled local learning in 2020 after Google's security team showed the learned state could be used as a fingerprint. It now blocks from a pre-trained list that EFF refreshes.

Is Privacy Badger better than uBlock Origin? They're solving different problems. uBlock Origin blocks from curated lists and handles ads properly; Privacy Badger targets tracking behaviour. Comparing them on ad blocking flatters the wrong one.

Is Privacy Badger free? Yes — free, open source, and made by a non-profit with no paid tier and nothing to upsell.

Get started: Install DNDShield · How online tracking works · Browser fingerprinting explained