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NoSchibsGiven

JavaScript ★ 73 updated 3d ago

A free browser extension that blocks Schibsted's paid consent popups on Norwegian and Swedish news sites.

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NoSchibsGiven is a browser extension that blocks consent popups on websites owned by Schibsted, a large Scandinavian media company. Schibsted runs news sites including VG, Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, and others across Norway and Sweden. When visitors without a paid subscription arrive, these sites show a popup asking them to either pay a monthly fee to opt out of ad tracking or accept tracking to keep reading for free. Norwegian data protection authorities and consumer organizations quoted in the README argue that charging for privacy this way violates European data protection rules.

The extension stops those popups from appearing at all, using two layers of protection. First, it blocks network requests to the servers that deliver the popup scripts before they can load at all, covering both Schibsted's own consent tool and other sites that use the same third-party consent system. Second, a backup script automatically removes any leftover consent elements from the page after it finishes loading, as a fallback. It also blocks Schibsted's own tracking and analytics tools and some third-party ad networks, but only on Schibsted's own pages.

Installation requires manually loading the extension as an unpacked file, since it is not published to any official browser store. The README gives step-by-step instructions for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and Firefox; Safari is not supported without Xcode and developer tools, and the project is looking for a contributor to build that version.

The extension does not block tracking on non-Schibsted websites, does not cover finn.no since the README notes it is a separate platform, and cannot stop server-side logging on the sites themselves. It is free and open source, released under the MIT license.

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