[PrivacyBadger] Using the behaviour engine for other purposes

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

Hi all! 

Many thanks for the Privacy Badger, it alone makes my EFF membership well 
worth, and I hope to increase my donation in near future. I would like to 
share an idea: 

Would it be possible to refactor the code so that the engine checking 
whether you are tracked can be reused in completely different contexts?

I have a couple of use cases for it: I'd like to run it on a forward proxy 
at home. We have simply too many devices in the house, and to install the 
browser extension on all is too much work. And who knows what other apps 
than the browsers are doing...? So, I figured, I'd rather set it on a Squid 
proxy and let that block the trackers... 

My second use case is to use it an a Web crawler. I'm in Norway, and the 
public sector is being automated and streamlined. I strongly support this 
effort, but sometimes they mess things up. For example, they make heavy use 
of Google Analytics, which I think is a bad idea in itself, but it gets 
worse when they also mess up the settings and enable the DoubleClick 
cookies, which is a blatant violation of the law. I have used Privacy 
Badger to alert me to this fact and send complaints, and the response has 
been OK: "Thank you for the notification, we are truly sorry, and have 
disabled the cookie promptly", but this is apparently *really* hard, 
because every agency seems to get it wrong every now and then... :-/ 
So, if citizen vigilance is required, I should at least automate it. It is 
straightforward to hack a crawler that monitors these sites, but it would 
be nice to re-use the code that Privacy Badger has to determine the 
likelyhood of trackers. 

Cheers,

Kjetil