# Privacy Pass

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Privacy Pass and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for passing human checks across sites without cross-site tracking; critics say the extension often just shows challenge pages and its privacy claims are unproven.

## Why people recommend it

- Proves humanness without cross-site tracking (2 comments): "lets you use the "humanness" token across different websites without them being able to use it as a tracking signal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968189)) "cryptographic tokens that you can use for searches without them being linked to your account" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397015))
- Zero-knowledge approach praised as interesting (2 comments): "People, you have to read about zero knowledge proofs. Look at e.g. Privacy Pass." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079824)) "Look at Privacy Pass, it's interesting!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061960))
- Seen as a better privacy option (3 comments): "the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49397030)) "there are technologies that don't have this issue, eg. privacy pass" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593000)) "this seems like a good solution" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412241))

## What people warn about

- Extension mostly just redirects to challenges (2 comments): "The only thing the browser extension does for me is redirect me to an “Interactive challenge“ page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822306)) "their extension implementing it seems to do absolutely nothing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400884))
- Privacy claims doubted (2 comments): "Having Privacy in the name doesn't mean it's actually privacy preserving." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092504)) "I see no trust path other than “us, bro”." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268077))
- Still requires authentication like ID checks (2 comments): "This sounds just as bad as having to use a digital ID, age verification, etc..." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48638256)) "every time there is a captcha it makes you authenticate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959860))
- Reported broken and possibly unmaintained (2 comments): "looks like even Cloudflare's Silk Privacy Pass with challenge tokens is broken" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965645)) "seems kind of dead (a dependabot zombie)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661553))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [SponsorBlock](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sponsorblock.md): 137 recommend
- [Firefox Multi-Account Containers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/firefox-containers.md): 76 recommend
- [NoScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/noscript.md): 61 recommend
- [Consent-O-Matic](https://hackerapproved.com/p/consent-o-matic.md): 36 recommend
- [LibRedirect](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libredirect.md): 35 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Privacy Pass", https://hackerapproved.com/p/privacy-pass/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).