Ghostery: A Faster, Safer, Smarter Browsing Experience

[Rengar]

We review Ghostery, the Google Chrome browser extension designed to keep your online world private.
Ghostery, is all about helping users protect their privacy online, by stopping advertisers, social media, and other services from collecting and storing your browsing and shopping habits. If you believe your valuable personal data should remain private, you should seriously consider giving it a try.

The Ghostery extension for Chrome is great for those who value online prvacy.

What are ‘trackers?’
A great question. You’re on fire today!

Every time you go online, unless you take active steps to protect yourself, you leave behind you a digital footprint that tracking technologies (trackers) use to view your online behavior, collect data about you, and then try and target advertising at you, or sell it on to someone else, to try and do the same thing. It’s the consequence of living in a connected world.

Ghostery reveals who is working ‘behind the scenes’ on pages you visit, and gives you control over the personal data you share with those companies.



Why Ghostery?
Ghostery’s main selling point is that it lets you block all the trackers on the websites you browse on-line and see just exactly who is trying to track you. As a bonus, it also anonymises your data using anti-tracking technology. Ghostery uses a large database and its large and constantly updated database that helps it block advertising and social media trackers. A particularly nice feature is its ability to link you to the privacy policies and opt-out options of most of the major ad and tracking companies.

As well as this, Ghostery does a great job of detecting ads ad trackers on its own, and automatically blocks scripts, elements, and cookies.

As a consequence of all that automatic smart blocking above, Ghostery does a good job in speeding up web-page loading times, by removing ads and getting rid of all that other unwanted page clutter.

Cool. What does it work on?
Ghostery is compatible with all the major web browsers, including, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and so on. It’s easy to install, and the options including the one to opt in or out of its ‘GhostRank’ are all easily accessible. You can customize it to your heart’s content or just let it do its thing automatically.

Although Ghostery blocks links very well, this means it can sometimes result in certain websites becoming unviewable. If this happens you may have to test each blocked tracker individually, to work out what’s caused the issue, and this obviously can take a bit of time.

Overall though, Ghostery is relaible, easy to use and provides control and peace of mind – which is why we recommend you should give it try. You can try for free right here.

 

[TairikuOkami]

Ghostery was good, once, but it died with the version 7, thanks to the slow scripted GUI.

 

[RejZoR]

Anyone knows how their Enhanced Anti-Tracking works? Is there even a need to use the blacklist and fiddle with individual trackers blocking when this feature allegedly anonymizes trackers so they can't track you even if they are loaded? Seems like a smarter way to use Ghostery. Plus it's not a pain in the butt when actual blocking breaks many things...

 

[HarborFront]

Anyone knows how their Enhanced Anti-Tracking works? Is there even a need to use the blacklist and fiddle with individual trackers blocking when this feature allegedly anonymizes trackers so they can't track you even if they are loaded? Seems like a smarter way to use Ghostery. Plus it's not a pain in the butt when actual blocking breaks many things...

The enhanced anti-tracking is similar to Privacy Badger which uses algorithms to block trackers

Ghostery 8 improves anti-tracking and ad-blocking functions - gHacks Tech News

Ghostery now uses blocklist and algorithm to block trackers

 

[RejZoR]

But would be sufficient enough to only use algorithm based blocking in Ghostery?

 

[HarborFront]

But would be sufficient enough to only use algorithm based blocking in Ghostery?

Cliqz bought over Ghostery for this reason and that's to have both blocking methods.

Isn't using 2 different methods better than 1?

 

[Faybert]

Ghostery is really safe?

 

[HarborFront]

Ghostery is really safe?

You mean privacy aspect? I don't think so. It's best you read the privacy policy to see what personal info they are collecting from you

 

[Arequire]

Ghostery is really safe?

It's safe but if you opt-in to GhostRank then its business model becomes highly questionable. If you don't opt-in then - according to its privacy policy - all it collects is your standard system information: IP address, web browser and operating system.

Isn't using 2 different methods better than 1?

It is but the issue with Ghostery's heuristics is that there's zero feedback about what they're doing. Cliqz states the heuristics "overwrite any uniquely identifying data points" but what they don't state is what exactly those data points are.

 

[Faybert]

You mean privacy aspect? I don't think so. It's best you read the privacy policy to see what personal info they are collecting from you

Yes, I read some comments about Ghostery being from a private company that sells your data to third parties, I do not know if it's true or not, so I asked..

 

[HarborFront]

It is but the issue with Ghostery's heuristics is that there's zero feedback about what they're doing. Cliqz states the heuristics "overwrite any uniquely identifying data points" but what they don't state is what exactly those data points are.

Does it really matters? If you want to use it then you don't have a choice otherwise use other online blockers if you are concerned with your privacy. I believe what they don't disclose are things proprietary to them.

 

[Arequire]

Does it really matters? If you want to use it then you don't have a choice otherwise use other online blockers if you are concerned with your privacy. I believe what they don't disclose are things proprietary to them.

It matters if they want their product's reputation to improve, and it matters because they're bragging about being the only blocklist/heuristic combo game in town.

Blocklists alone aren't good enough because they rely on a reactive approach instead of proactive one. Session replay scripts proved why this doesn't work with them going completely undetected for years, not to mention blocklists are easily detected and increasingly being bypassed.

Heurisitcs alone aren't good enough either because they're not mature enough, prone to false blockages and current implementations simply aren't as effective as blocklists (page 9, PB).

Combining them is the next logical step but the way the Ghostery team has done so is ridiculous and just sows seeds of mistrust and/or incompetence.

 

[Azure]

It matters if they want their product's reputation to improve, and it matters because they're bragging about being the only blocklist/heuristic combo game in town.

Blocklists alone aren't good enough because they rely on a reactive approach instead of proactive one. Session replay scripts proved why this doesn't work with them going completely undetected for years, not to mention blocklists are easily detected and increasingly being bypassed.

Heurisitcs alone aren't good enough either because they're not mature enough, prone to false blockages and current implementations simply aren't as effective as blocklists (page 9, PB).

Combining them is the next logical step but the way the Ghostery team has done so is ridiculous and just sows seeds of mistrust and/or incompetence.

Regarding the possibility of false blockage.

Isn't that why the following was implemented?

"The extension’s Smart Blocking functionality is another. It is designed to analyze the blocking of trackers to make sure that page’s are not broken when trackers are blocked. Ghostery may unblock trackers if it detects that a page is broken if specific trackers are blocked. Advanced users may turn off the feature to remain in full control."

 

[codswollip]

So we exchange tracker avoidance for Ghostery's tracking. I'll pass.
Is it safe to use the Ghostery privacy extension? - ExtremeTech

 

[Faybert]

So we exchange tracker avoidance for Ghostery's tracking. I'll pass.
Is it safe to use the Ghostery privacy extension? - ExtremeTech

Great interview, thanks for sharing, Telos.

 

[Arequire]

Regarding the possibility of false blockage.

Isn't that why the following was implemented?

"The extension’s Smart Blocking functionality is another. It is designed to analyze the blocking of trackers to make sure that page’s are not broken when trackers are blocked. Ghostery may unblock trackers if it detects that a page is broken if specific trackers are blocked. Advanced users may turn off the feature to remain in full control."

I was more referring to Privacy Badger's implementation in that regard. It has a long history of blocking resources that end up breaking entire websites (CDNs were big one), although after I trained PB on Moz's top 500 sites it seemed that the impact had lessened since the last time I used it.

As for Ghostery's Smart Blocking: Yes, it's meant to stop those who are less technically minded from having their web pages broken but in-turn it is way, way too excitable about unblocking things that have absolutely no reason to be unblocked. Anything on Ghostery's so-called "essential" list (which includes things that aren't actually essential to the user but to the site publisher) is liable to be unblocked immediately. Also if an ad/tracker is slow to load it'll just go ahead and unblock it, letting ads/trackers you expect to be blocked slip the net.

 

[RejZoR]

So we exchange tracker avoidance for Ghostery's tracking. I'll pass.
Is it safe to use the Ghostery privacy extension? - ExtremeTech

Everything is optional. You can use Ghostery without allowing it to share your data with the developers of Ghostery.