July 2, 2026
Trackers blocked, commenters unlocked
Show HN: I made a tool that prevents websites from tracking you
A tiny anti-tracking tool drops, and the crowd instantly asks: why not just use uBlock
TLDR: GetBlocked! is a small Chrome extension that blocks some common web tracking and keeps everything on your device. The community reaction was way spicier than the launch: people questioned whether it does anything new, side-eyed the creator’s AI use, and joked that poisoning trackers with fake data might be even better.
A scrappy new Chrome add-on called GetBlocked! rolled into Show HN promising cleaner pages, fewer creepy trackers, and zero data leaving your computer. The pitch is simple: it blocks some common tracking requests, strips sneaky tags from links, and gives users a little report showing what a site tried to do behind the scenes. It’s open source, lightweight, and very much marketed as the friendly, beginner-accessible privacy helper rather than a giant all-in-one blocker.
But the real action was in the comments, where the community immediately turned this launch into a mini trial. The loudest reaction was basically: "Cool... but what does this do that uBlock doesn’t?" That one question set the tone, with people side-eyeing whether the tool is useful on its own or just a smaller version of something they already trust. Then came the AI subplot: one commenter zeroed in on the creator’s note about using AI “only for formatting,” treating it like a full-on credibility scandal and asking, in essence, how much of this did you really make? Ouch.
And because no internet debate is complete without a chaotic galaxy-brain idea, another commenter proposed the funniest escalation of all: don’t block trackers, poison them with garbage data until their datasets become worthless. That spicy little revenge fantasy may have stolen the show. So yes, the extension is about privacy—but the comment section was about suspicion, purity tests, and a dream of trolling the surveillance economy into oblivion.
Key Points
- •GetBlocked! is presented as a lightweight, local-only Chrome extension that blocks selected third-party trackers, cleans tracking URL parameters, and reports visible tracking attempts.
- •The extension uses Chrome declarativeNetRequest to block a conservative, curated list of third-party tracker domains in order to reduce website breakage.
- •It removes common tracking parameters such as utm_source, fbclid, gclid, dclid, and mc_cid, and stores page report data locally in chrome.storage.local.
- •The article explicitly states that the tool does not block every tracker, does not provide anonymity, does not stop server-side tracking, and is not a replacement for full-featured ad blockers.
- •The project is open source and includes a contributor workflow based on editing tracker catalogs, regenerating derived files, and running tests.