JM Horner

@girlfreddy @aeternum

Sigh… now that I am home I am able to open the Wired article. The second link is to a vice.com article which says:

“Ghostery 6.0 is a from-the-ground-up re-imagining of how to design a privacy-enhancing browser extension so that its features are more easily accessible to a mainstream audience.”

In other words, this is NOT their old version, and it says nothing about any previous versions, ownership, management, or financing of the product. The fourth link in the article is to another Wired article:

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/

Which states:

“Ghostery, another popular ad blocker, operates under a different model. As a user, you don’t see ads and aren’t tracked by pesky data trackers. The company, however, makes money by collecting anonymized data on what those trackers pick up. It repackages that data and resells it to publishers, websites, and other companies it says can use the information to help improve the speed, privacy, and performance of their sites.”

Followed by a footnote that says:

“UPDATE 3:47 PM ET 03/02/16: This story has been updated to accurately reflect that Ghostery does not collect the same data that third-party trackers collect, but rather collects and sells data about the trackers themselves.”

I have a hard time not seeing this as:

“Ghostery was getting a shitty reputation because people did not understand that they were selling information about stooges to other stooges. Their solution was to make a dramatic shift in their business model in hopes that they could win back privacy points.”

When it comes to digital privacy, I am not big on second chances. If Meta says they are going to opensource some portion of their crap it doesn’t win them any points with me and I won’t be trusting them with any digital data. Whatever anyone else’s opinion may be, there is plenty there to keep me from trusting Ghostery, opensource or not.

I’m also not a fan of Wikipedia [not a primary source] but even they have this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism

Thanks, I’ll pass on the sketchy ad blocker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBRpW5sEvJk

@bamboo
Feel free to point out where anyone suggested that anyone else should use “an decades old and known exploitable browser”.

@girlfreddy @aeternum

I tried to open the wired link and got a 404, then tried again and got a 504, then tried again and got a 503.

I then opened the lifehacker link, and it opened fine. The content of that link gives me the impression Ghostery may have had ties to ad companies. At the bottom of the article they link to Mashable as their source here:

https://mashable.com/2013/06/17/ad-blocker-helps-ad-industry/

At the top of that article it says the source is MIT Technology Review which just links to a description of the “author” here:

https://mashable.com/author/technologyreview

A StartPage search turned up

https://www.technologyreview.com/

And another StartPage search turned up:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/06/17/177933/a-popular-ad-blocker-also-helps-the-ad-industry/

Which was apparently written by Tom Simonite who is described as “MIT Technology Review’s San Francisco bureau chief” (whatever that means) here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/author/tom-simonite/

Since the Wired article seems to be the only one I can’t open, I guess it is unable to defend itself beyond the title of the article, which says that (1) Ghostery is now open source and (2) Ghostery has a new business model. Based on what I can see, it would appear to me as though Ghostery was actually owned/managed by Evidon. My interpretation of that would have to be that their OLD business model included selling information to advertisers. I tried to go to evidon.com but it was blocked by my intentional DNS poisoning (a sign that it is a scummy domain). After temporarily changing my DNS resolver to one of the servers hosted by

https://dns.watch/

I was able to resolve evidon.com, but it just redirected me to

https://www.crownpeak.com/products/privacy-and-consent-management/

Which is clearly a business that is designed to help businesses monetize web services while staying just barely legal and maximize the amount of data a marketer can pull from people without getting in shit for not actually getting consent from them.

So, when you say

“It is not, and never has been, in league with ad companies.”

Do you mean I have imagined all of the above? Because it sounds pretty shady to me that a company affiliated with Evidon and Crownpeak would be making a product line like the ones at Ghostery.

@Bogasse

“Phone calls home”

In previous versions you could search your about:config on the “value” field, this is no longer possible. Searching for https:// and http:// would give you a list of numerous URLs, most of which are under Mozilla’s own domains. Some might argue that things like updates are necessary to ensure a secure browser. Others might argue that they have run very outdated browsers without problems for years, and that combined with forced updates and the Maintenance Service, the log files generated produce a not-insignificant amount of information about users.

@Xylight Firefox v2.0.20 in 2008 was the last “good” version. Since then it has been awesome bar, pocket, forced VPN ads, ftp support, PAC support, XUL bombing, and phone calls home. I use Librewolf, and while it is tolerable it is still tired to a garbage browser. :-(

@aeternum I dunno… Dillo is pretty bad!

@aeternum there are no good browsers. :-(