Scripts, applets, analytics and ads: the web has a wide range of content which might compromise your privacy. And normally there’s not a great deal you can do about it.

Policeman is a Firefox add-on which helps you fight back, by giving complete control over which content you’d like to access, and which should be blocked.

At its simplest, the add-on works as a useful way to view the requests made by a page: the images, styles, scripts, objects, frames and more.

Life gets more interesting when you start to construct rules, custom filters which define the content types you’ll allow or block, and their source or destination domains.

Simple rules allow or block content types, optionally by domain

This could be used as a simple blacklist (“block” requests for “anything” from “malicious.com” to “any domain”), or something much more finely balanced (“block” requests for “scripts” from “this.com” to “that.com”), depending on your needs.

Setting this up can take a while, as the developer warns: “This add-on requires quite a lot of interaction from user to get things working. Some sites will not work properly until you have allowed the required content.”

Still, if you do have problems, the filtering can be temporarily disabled with a click. And Policeman gives you so much control over the content you can access that it might be worth the initial setup hassles.