whotracks.me VS ghostery-extension

* There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.*

Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers.

https://whotracks.me/

Thank you for the feedback!

Granted, blocklists (lists of tracking domains or URL query parameters) can be circumvented by a determined attacker. Indeed, I agree that blocklists aren't sufficient on their own for a browser to provide solid privacy protection. In my view it's critical, primarily, to have policies that enforce privacy, including such protections as state partitioning and fingerprinting resistance. That's exactly why I included tests for such policies.

However: I do think blocklists provide substantial, though incomplete, privacy protection in practice. And, importantly, blocklists are enforced by a number of popular browsers (Brave, DuckDuckGo, Firefox Private Mode, Firefox Focus) and popular browser extensions and other services (uBlock, ClearURLs, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Disconnect, etc.). These blocklists seem to work pretty well, at least judging by the ad-free experience they provide. So I felt that to give a more complete picture I should test for blocking.

I tried to avoid cherry picking query parameters or blockers. Here's how I arrived at the current selections for these two sections:

* Tracking query parameter tests: I tried to gather all the query parameters I could find; the list on the page was my full list at the time. (If there are suggestions for more parameters, I will be happy to add them.)

* Tracker content blocking tests: I used the list of the top 20 tracking entities from https://whotracks.me. These are, roughly speaking, 20 of the most widespread third-party tracking domains on the web -- they should be a high priority for any browser respecting privacy, in my opinion. I hope testing for blocking of these 20 serves to gives a sense of each browser's approach to third-party tracking scripts and pixels.

https://whotracks.me/ and https://www.ghostery.com/ and I wondered how they manage to find all these trackers, I usually only were able to find these hardcoded ones like google analytics on this site for example: https://cellinoplumbing.com/

Ghostery neither collects nor sells data about users or trackers. In fact, they even open the insights they have about the tracking landscape via https://whotracks.me/ so that everyone can benefit from it.

Privacy Badge: Blocks cookies with domains cookies collecting unique identifiers after it was sent a Do Not Track message. Focus only on google, facebook and amazon and check whotracks.me.

Note the differences. Top left search results in mention of file within the files. Now try this search. It's a different kind of result set.

What part is closed sourced?

Am instalat si eu extensia Ghostery si dupa ceva cautari in lista de domenii blocate din pihole am dat de discutia de mai jos in link (communities like the Firefox subreddit seem to believe (rather zealously) that Ghostery is closed source and sells their users browser history to ad companies.)

If you have ideas in how we can improve, best leave a comment on https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension/issues/908 or open a new ticket. We did already change the UI a bit based on the feedback that we got so far. If there is more that we can do, please let us know. :-)

There's some more details here and here. There are some mentions of Chrome so presumably not an issue with the recent FF update. Basically it seems Ghostery needed to push out an update to fix its filters bc it was blocking Reddit as a tracker by default.

Release 8.6.1 · ghostery/ghostery-extension

Disclaimer: I work for Ghostery. I respond to protect my own name, not my employer.

Ghostery is not selling user data.

Let me point out a few facts:

All browser-side code is open source https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension and https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-dnr-extension.

Yes, Ghostery has a subscription based business model and that another reason to great care in protecting users privacy. Take a look on how we use blind tokens to authenticate subscribed users while searching on glowstery.com https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-search-extension (notice that even when you are a subscribed user there is no session cookie so queries cannot be linked).

Hope this sheds some light on the accusation. If that’s not enough, I do sincerely recommend uBlock Origin or AdGuard on Apple’s platform.

Btw, I don't know if you noticed but ghostery is open source.

1) Ghostery has been open-source for a few years a now. 2) The software used to be owned by Evidon. After 2017, it has been owned, open-sourced, and maintained by privacy-focus devs. Ghostery does not sell data.