Recently there were many new privacy-related restrictions for Internet companies and services in the European Region. These regulations and rules, called GDPR, were imposed by the European Union. Under these rules, the data about the user is secured to prevent incidents like the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica data leak and others. But these rules are not applied globally. This means if you reside in a country that is not a part of the European Union, you might not get this security benefit.
Many people use VPN connection based in one of these European Union countries, but that would not be a reliable measure as the data traffic, IP Address of the user was still traced by the VPN service provider. Hence to fix this, a way to do is to run a script that would let the service think that you are accessing it from this European Union region with using a VPN Service even though you are not in European Union. Here is where Trans Europa Express extension for Firefox comes into the picture.
Trans Europa Express extension for Mozilla Firefox
This Trans Europa Express Extension is only available for Mozilla Firefox and not for Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome. As we already said earlier, with this extension, you can pretend to access the websites and services that you are accessing from a country that is a part of the European Union. This works fine by selling Google Adsense advertisements in non-personalized mode.
It works in the following two ways:
- It tries to detect special scripts that websites may use to give European users control over privacy settings and data collecting.
- If it finds such a script, it attempts to call the scripts to enable European-style protections, rules, and restrictions.
As of now, this extension only relies on detecting the googletag instances, and then attempts to set them to non-personalized advertisement when it detects them on websites or services.
I would still say that using a VPN connection service would be more reliable than using this extension, but as we discussed earlier, the VPN Connection Service Provider can access them as per their wish. The addition of more scripts would really make this extension better, but that depends on how good they can modify or use the scripts to trick websites and services.
If interested, you can get the latest version of this Trans Europa Express for Mozilla Firefox from here.
