AVG has just launched “Crumble” which is an extension for Chrome that blocks third-party behavior tracking on the web when it is active.

As you all know, cookies (hence the name ‘Crumble’) can be good/bad or both. Functionally they can be necessary to enable site functionality…but are often abused to create tracking profiles for your browsing on the net. Some domains can plant hundreds of cookies on your computer just to do that bit of data merchandising.

To find out how many cookies you have,

1. Tap on the Alt-key on your keyboard and select Tools > Options.
2. Switch to Privacy and select Show Cookies. Note that this is only visible on the page if you have set the history to "use custom settings for history".
3. The cookies window displays sites and the cookies they have saved to your system.

Or, you can do it through chrome://settings/cookies in the address bar.

Or, you can use third party programs:

1. IE Cookies View displays all Internet Explorer cookies saved to the system (Windows-only).
2. Mozilla Cookies View does the same for Mozilla-based browsers (Windows-only).
3. Chrome Cookies View does the same for Chrome-based browsers (Windows-only).

Anyway, one option to protect your browser and yourself from being tracked online, or to minimize the exposure, is to block third-party cookies and/or to delete cookies regularly.

With ‘Crumble’,

“AVG promises to do one better with the launch of Crumble for Chrome. The extension blocks third-party behavior tracking on the Internet as well, but instead of blocking cookies outright, it isolates them instead.

Crumble intercepts 3rd party cookies and controls what information is sent back to the web tracking companies, stopping trackers from following and profiling you via cookies based on the sites you visit.

The security company notes that Crumble is capable of identifying cookie types so that it does not have to rely on blacklists or lists of trackers for its functionality. On added side-effect of this is that Crumble will process newly created advertising domains used for user tracking as good as it will established sites.

AVG's Crumble displays the number of processed cookies on domains you are visiting as a number on the extension's icon. It furthermore displays direct information about these trackers, or more precisely domains they come from, in an overlay on the screen that vanishes automatically after a short period of time.

The extension ships with a single control element: the option to turn the blocking of trackers on or off.” – gHacks

It’s not an adblocker, though.

So, as Martin Brinkmann at gHacks states, it’s not really clear that it has an advantage over Privacy Badger (for Chrome and Mozilla). It’s also not clear how many sites it might break.

Source:

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/04/27/avg-crumble-third-party-behavior-tracking-blocker-for-chrome/?_m=3n%2e0038%2e1592%2ehj0ao01hy5%2e1nfk