Access PrivacyBadger results from Selenium tests

[verzulli]

Hi all,
I'd like to access PB results (the ones reported in popup.html) from within Selenium tests.

Basically, I'm trying to check "privacy compliance" of various websites (Public Administrations, mainly), and I want to automate such a check with Selenium.

Instead of reinventing the wheel adding my own logic to search for relevant tag, script, cookie, etc.... I thought to use Selenium with a Firefox profile that includes the Privacy Badger Extension, so to offload the detection activities to PB...

I've been successful in configuring the profile and, at the moment, when selenium request a web-page, it properly show PB results (see image below).

How can I get further, retrieving such info from within my code? Can PB "inject" its result somewhere so, for me, to retrieve it? As far as you know, is there a way, from Selenium, to get access to "extension data" ( POPUP_DATA.origins within skin/popup.html would be perfect!)?

Please note that I'm using Selenium with NodeJS

[ghostwords]

Hello! You could open options.html, get a handle to the background page and thus gain access to the various data structures.

Per-tab results are stored in the badger.tabData object. You can find an example of querying tab data in Privacy Badger's Selenium-powered tests.

Note that you will need to open options.html in a new window, keeping the original website tab open to avoid Privacy Badger cleaning up tabData.

Let me know if this helps.

[verzulli]

IT WORKED!!!! :-)

First of all, THANK YOU VERY MUCH for answering!

I've had some troubles getting deeper with your suggestions (a bit "too-summarized" for my very-basic-level of understanding of selenium-related activities)... but in the end, I succeded :-)

Just for the benefit of other people, getting here, let me rephrase @ghostwords suggestions:

1. The PB extension is BROWSER-WIDE. So, if the extension is properly installed AND you load a web page in a TAB AND you open PB in A DIFFERENT TAB, THEN accessing the tabData data-structure from within the PB TAB.... will give you the results ALSO of the other TABs (aka: including the one you loaded previously and that you want to check with PB);

So, in order to access PB datastructure you simply need to:

2. ensure to rely on a browser with the extension properly installed and configured (I guess the extension can be installed on-the-fly but I've been unable to do so. So I lasted in using a pre-configured Firefox profile, with the extension already installed);
3. open you URL, normally (...so that it will load in the default first TAB). Keep track of such a TAB, to switch back to it, later on;
4. inject a javascript to the browser, to open a new TAB;

in the new TAB

5. open the PB option page;
6. access the tabData datastructure to retrieve your information, sending them back to the main application;
7. inject a javascript to "close" the TAB
8. tell Selenium to move back to the main TAB, by using the aforementioned handle (point 3. above);

loop as many times as you want...

I just published my application (under A-GPL v.3) - Privacy Web-Hunter - on GitLab. Feel free to give it a look :-)

The component interacting with PB is pageChecker.js - see process method

Thanks again for your support!