As people spend more and more time using phones and tablets, privacy and security for mobile browsers has become an acute problem. That’s why we’re excited to see a new Android browser called WARP improving the state of the field. WARP was built by Qualcomm and EMbience, and includes ports of EFF's Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere tools to bring privacy and security protections to a wider, mobile audience.
WARP is a patched version of Google's Chromium codebase. Its built-in features include Web Defender, which is a privacy mechanism that is compatible with EFF’s Privacy Badger 1.0, and Secure Connect, which is a native port of HTTPS Everywhere. WARP may also be used as the basis for customized browsers shipped by wireless carriers and handset manufacturers. However, we recommend that, if you want to use WARP (or any other browser), it's best to get the version from the Play Store rather than one that may have been modified in undocumented ways by carriers or handset manufacturers.
Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere are, of course, also available to download for desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. HTTPS Everywhere is also available as an extension for Firefox on Android and is bundled by default with Brave's browsers, too. Brave is a particularly good option on iOS.
Learn more about HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger below.
Third-party tracking—that is, when advertisers and websites track your browsing activity across the web without your knowledge, control, or consent—is an alarmingly widespread practice in online advertising. Privacy Badger puts you back in control by spotting and then blocking third-party domains that seem to be tracking your browsing habits. Although Privacy Badger blocks many ads in practice, it is more a privacy tool than a strict ad blocker. Privacy Badger encourages advertisers to treat users respectfully and anonymously rather than the industry status quo of online tracking. It does this by unblocking content from domains which respect our Do Not Track policy, which states that the participating site will not retain any information about users who have expressed that they do not want to be tracked.
A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere is an extension for Firefox (both desktop and Android), Chrome, and Opera that makes your browser use HTTPS to encrypt its communication with websites wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
