fixanoid

New York City | Full-Time | Ghostery

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Ghostery appears on Hacker News quiet often and sometimes people here think that we should do things differently. Well, here we are, open for change if you join us -- you, a senior level developer that will most definitely affect the product direction, future of what Ghostery is, and affect the millions of users that use Ghostery every single day. Full job description is here: https://purplebox.ghostery.com/post/1016024115 To apply, email us your CV or resume to careers@ghostery.com or follow the links in the blog post.

We are in New York City and hope that the candidate is local, though relocation assistance is offered. International candidates are welcome as well. Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

The source is not just very readable, we make it publicly available for review. Here are some links: - AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/files/browse/254748... - Chrome: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/

We are most definitely not influenced by third parties, if anything, companies now contact us directly to provide their registration information for monitoring by Ghostery. Additionally, we keep the database changes public here: https://www.ghostery.com/en/database/changelog

Thank you, thats exactly what we do. =)

lol

Well, you are already using one of the best tools to keep your online footprint to a minimum, and it plainly asks you if you want to contribute data. This is an option and its off by default.

Its explained in many places, such as our website, our FAQ, our support board, all the store listings, and finally in the extension itself.

Ghostrank is not a tracking service of the user, its a way to measure the ecosystem of trackers in the webbernets.

No one is intentionally obscuring anything. If you have a better idea of how to explain what we do, by all means, please tell me and I shall make it happen.

What happens is straight forward tho. Ghostery collects tracker data as you browse and sends it to us if you've allowed us to collect the data by enabling Ghostrank.

We take the data in, strip it of anything that may point it back to any user and sell it in packages to anyone interested in these reports. Heres what some of the reports purchased from us looks like: https://purplebox.ghostery.com/misc/trackermap/2.html or https://purplebox.ghostery.com/misc/trackermap/5.html

Well, the option is actually to turn in on. By default, Ghostery does not collect anything.

Heh, it may not sell it to ad agencies, but it sure sends data back to them.

DNTMe is probably the worst choice to use for tracking protection, heres a study we have on the topic http://www.areweprivateyet.com

Ughh, Ghostery isn't FLOSS, but that does not make the code invisible, many places where you can see it like: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/vers... or ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/

And there is this: http://www.areweprivateyet.com

Thanks for asking relevant questions and I agree about the dissonance. Our teams job is to make sure they are minimized and we're working on fixing those things. Something to keep in mind tho is that our team is very small (4 people), so it takes time to get stuff done.

As I said, we are adjusting to fit what our users think rather than what we preached. The site is 2 month old, and it reflects the new updated stance, and as I said earlier, the extensions will also be updated with pre-configured settings.

I'm not sure what you mean by that question? Ghostery is a separate team inside Evidon with full control over what we do. I'm one of the people managing the product and my customers are users of Ghostery. As such, my primary goal isn't improved blocking, its education - to let users know that they are being tracked, to provide relevant info on who are the trackers and where to find out more about them, and finally, provide control in the form of blocking.

Your argument would be much better placed in our support forum. There, we do see much more opinions that are not the same, and the conclusions we draw are based on a bunch of inputs, but our support forum is probably the #1 place for issues we look at. Blocking pre-selections are currently slotted for mid-2014 because its actually a low priority item according to the votes we see.

If you feel strongly that your opinion is important and should be prioritized, please create relevant topic here: https://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/ and gather support to change it so we address it quicker.

Ghostery is available as a stand alone app for iOS, and has extensions for mobile Firefox and Opera.

Indeed, I am Ghostery Lord & Master =) -- one of the people who run, develop, and see to the success of it.

Hi gorhill, interesting study. Ghostery runs its own to see how effective privacy extensions are, here it is: http://www.areweprivateyet.com/

Ghostery database is not static either and we update it very often, if you feel we are missing something, please let us know.

Quesera, this is a good point I didn't cover.

Ghostery does not call itself a tracker-blocker, our users do. This is an obvious oversight for most users, and its somethign that we will address, but at this time, Ghostery is designed to reveal the invisible web and give user the control over it, not make decisions for the users...

As far as the feature, at the implementation time, we've queried a set of users that agreed that when new trackers are added, there is no need to let the user know until s/he encounters it for the first time and reviews it. Obviously, this is another setting we will be moving away from advanced and into wizard so the users may review and select this option at install time.

Hehe, this makes me chuckle every time.

Hi quesera, thanks for asking.

This is somewhat wrong: Ghostery, ever since version 1, had Ghostrank feature in it. It has always been an opt-in deal, the users who trust us may turn it on so provide us with data. For the first 4 years the data sat without any use until recently where Evidon figured out how to turn it into money. Even so, the data Evidon sells has nothing about any user, merely tracker data. Here are some samples of whats actually delivered to clients: http://www.knowyourelements.com/ and http://www.evidon.com/evidon-trackermap/tagchains-static.htm....

As I said, we do not trick the users into anything, and are as transparent about where the data goes as possible, if you have suggestions how to increase this then please let us know. We currently cover this question in every listing Ghostery has, all options pages, web site, FAQ, and many posts on our blog.

As far as defaults: originally, Ghostery was a detection software designed to "reveal the invisible web", but has added blocking since. Our official stance is that we do not make decisions for the user, but we do run every user through an install wizard that explains whats up. Disconnects stance here is a different, they do offer default blocking, tho they also have their own "whiteliest" built into it without telling the users about it. We are going to add some easy configuration in the near future that will pre-block stuff, but this is still in the works.

Finally, Ghostery source is available for review for "sneakiness" since every extension is pure javascript. We host it here if you're interested: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/ and you can just unzip any other extension to extract source.

Heh, Ghostery is not paid to whitelist anyone, I would know since I run the database for Ghostery.

As to your question: NoScript does a different thing -- it concentrates on limiting known security issues by disabling Javscript. Tracking is accomplished in a variety of ways, and only some of them are Javascript based. Ghostery looks for all of these and lets users know who is tracking them on any given web page.

Oh, hai Brian!

Aren't you a former doubleclick-turn-righteous? And don't you also employ an ex-NSA dude?

And no, we do not sell user data, just tracker data.

Cheers!

Hi sboering, how are you?

Ghostery does what the user tells it to do. If you are seeing unblocked trackers, most likely, its because we've added new trackers and you didn't select "block" by default for the new trackers when the list gets updated. You can change this preference by going into Ghostery options, Advanced, and review the "auto-update" section.

And heres a full explanation as to what Evidon gets and what it does with it: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438

Hi troll! You are mistaken, betrad.com is in our database under Evidon.

Hi everyone! I'm one of the Ghostery devs.

Ghostery started offering Click-to-Play (c2p) functionality a little while back for some of the most common elements. Its very useful and our users love it -- it simply and quickly answers the questions like where did my video or comments go. Click-to-Play is configurable through Ghostery options and may be disabled if the user wants. (http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023750)

Heres a how Click-to-Play works in Ghostery. We have several databases that are shipped with Ghostery, one of them is a click to play mapper that is associated to particular trackers in the database. If a user happens to block a tracker thats on the c2p map, Ghostery will take an extra step to examine the DOM of the page where it blocked the tracker to find the visible anchor where the element was supposed to sit and inserts its own Ghostery control to let the user know at the expected place that Ghostery took action. In some cases, we advise Ghostery to attach to the parent node because the element we anchor to may be hidden or invisible. The anchors are provided by our developers when c2p entries are created.

Troy runs his blog on Blogspot, and the integration Disqus has with Blogspot is non-standard. Because of this, Ghostery selector for c2p relied on specific Blogspot format and attached c2p warning at the parent. A recent change in Blogspot templates have created a condition in which Ghostery sometimes removes the content of the site, like in Troy's case. This is a bug that will be resolved in the next release.

To cover some other topics raised in comments:

- Incognito mode is a good defense, but its not foolproof. Blocking and running incognito mode is even better

- Disconnect is an alternative to Ghostery, but the reason you don't see this issue with them is that it does not offer click-to-play nor does it block Disqus

- Ghostery, while not open-source, hosts its source for review here: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/ or https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/safari/. Additionally, you may simply unzip the contents of any extension to see what it does and how it works

I think the wikipedia entry is pretty clear that its an opt-in program that requires the user to check an option in the setup or options of Ghostery.

As far as other products, heres a handy chart we generate monthly to see which extension protects better: http://www.areweprivateyet.com/

Err, we've got a bug in Ghostery 5.0 for Disqus specifically that will be fixed in 5.1. Its related to click-2-play, so you may either disable it in Ghostery advanced options, or unblcok disqus on the site.

Heres a more comprehensive article on the topic: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438

Ghostery would only send data back to Evidon if GhostRank option is enabled.

Sadly, that article is full of shit. And I'll edit our entry later to remove the Criticism, which is only partly correct.

GhostRank is explicitly for collecting tracker information, and in no way does it allow an advertiser (tho most of the customers are publishers) to somehow improve their targeting.

This explains article what GhostRank does and what its for: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438

AMO process too sluggish or does Disconnect have something to hide? I personally really enjoy this "open source" code: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/master/firef...

Brian, I understand that its beneficial to you as a competitor to Ghostery to bash Ghostery at this point, but please, refrain from looking stupid.

Ghostery collects tracker information and not individual users info. Ghostery requires an opt-in before any data is shared. Anyone wishing to dig deeper should read the source code since its not obfuscated unlike some of your disconnect's open sourced code. If you do however have ideas on how we should be more transparent, by all means, please share them.