How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted May 29, 2015 21:29 UTC (Fri) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
Parent article: Speed and bandwidth improvements with Firefox Tracking Protection

I use the Ghostery add-on to Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ghostery/) - with the Ghostrank disabled. How does this compare to that?

FWIW, I also switched to uBlock and recently updated to RP Continued. And of course, NoScript. I don't understand how people can surf the web these days without some kind of protection like these.

How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted May 30, 2015 5:33 UTC (Sat) by rbrito (guest, #66188) [Link] (3 responses)

I've seen many smart people recommending Ghostery, which means that it must, somehow, be good.

On the other hand, I read on wikipedia that they had some dubious practices. Furthermore, it seems like it is a proprietary plugin.

A (few) question(s) for those that are familiar with it:

* is it "evil" in any way?
* if I have adblock plus and ghostery installed, which acts first?
* same question as above, but now with this Firefox Tracking Protection.

If anybody knows the answers to those, I would really, really love to know.

Thanks in advance.

How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted May 31, 2015 18:50 UTC (Sun) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (1 responses)

Honestly, I'm kind of in the same boat. I looked into Ghostery enough to know I should not enable their "GhostRank" functionality - so it doesn't *appear* to phone home any data. So I agree it's proprietary and potentialy evil.

I'd be happy with an open alternative - maybe this Firefox Tracking Protection (FTP) is it. However, I do wonder about the Disconnect blacklist mentioned in the article - I don't see any direct link to it's blacklist - so I wonder how that's working for Firefox. The description of their product indicates that it sets up a VPN back to their servers, which seems... less than optimal to me, and ripe for abuse. The available code is GPLv3, but the trademarks are retained (typical I guess). I'm curious why Firefox couldn't use one the many other lists available.

I don't know how all these plugins interact - it would be good for some Firefox expert to clarify that. On the PC I'm currently on, I have uBlock, noscript and just turned on FTP - no Ghostery. I went to cnet.com (as the firefox demo page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-... shows) and got no warning about tracking. This leads me to believe that uBlcock and/or noscript stopped that before the FTP could see it. Not a lot of info, but there ya go :-/.

Pete

How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted Jun 5, 2015 4:48 UTC (Fri) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

Disconnect's blocklist is public and GPL'd: http://services.disconnect.me/disconnect-plaintext.json

Firefox's Tracking Protection only uses a subset of it. Tracking Protection runs after add-ons like uBlock or Ghostery run (so add-ons that want to track or modify requests can still work), which explains why you see no Tracking Protection warnings on cnet.com.

How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted Jun 1, 2015 15:48 UTC (Mon) by kdave (subscriber, #44472) [Link]

I haven't observed any evil behaviour from ghostery plugin, it works well, can be configured to skip the blocking reports. The only outgoing traffic are pings for new database updates, can be disabled as well I think.

I don't know how the addon priorities are implemented. Observed behaviour matches "first installed, first in the queue". Eg. Ghostery catches the majority, and uBlock0 was still left with some work (probably because of different rule lists, no duplicates). Similar holds for Adblock (edge), only handful of additional matches.

When Disconnect was installed in pair with Ghostery, it reported 0 matches almost always. Similar with Privacy badger.

How does this compare to Ghostery

Posted Jun 4, 2015 8:13 UTC (Thu) by medhefgo (guest, #102962) [Link]

I think that there's zero point to Ghostery when you have Adblock Plus (or whatever fork you may prefer). All that's needed is adding a privacy protection filter list and it'll do what other privacy add-ons do, probably even better/faster since there's now only one add-on doing the filtering. I've been using the EasyPrivacy list since ages for this.
Additionally, you can also have a filter list to block all social media buttons completely with another filter. I haven't seen like buttons in ages :)

Regarding the comparison of the firefox protection list with adblock seems to be unfair to me as long as only a adblock filter list is used (afaik, adblock only has the ad blocking list on by default), but the article is unclear about this. It'll probably be on par if EasyPrivacy is used.