Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by ssokolow on June 21, 2012 · permalink

A perfect capstone on my need to protect my privacy. I've been Monstering my Cookies, Blocking my Flash, and No-ing my Scripts for a long time but, now, especially with the EU "cookie law" ramping up incentives to track without cookies, I started worrying about Referer headers.

After all, you can hardly tell Google that the Google Font Library and the Google AJAX CDN (which seems to serve everyone's jQuery these days) are illegal tracking tools... but the Referer header and a little smart coding let Google use them that way.

That's where RefControl comes in. It has a delightful little feature named "Default: FORGE" where I can satisfy most sites with meaningless fake Referer headers, but still whitelist the few sites like Snopes and Pixiv which are especially picky.

I wish there was a clear way to apply a whitelist to non-3rd-party URLs only, but aside from that, it's a perfect set-and-forget privacy tool.