Hacker News Reader

Comment by grimman | Hacker News Reader

It's a sad state of affairs when you're basically at war with the content providers. They want all sorts of metrics, and you pay for it in terms of processing, bandwidth and certainly not least your own privacy.

Then there's the issue with Ghostery itself being owned by Evidon. http://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to...

View on HN

Then there's the issue with Ghostery itself being owned by Evidon.

I think this is more heat than light. The "Ghost Rank" functionality, whereby anonymous usage data is uploaded to Evidon is opt-in with recent versions of Ghostery, and they have to pay for the engineers that created the tool and keep it up to date somehow...

I switched to disconnect.me a while back because I have a cynical view of a tracker blocker tracking people, even if there is the option to disable it.

And for similar reasons I dropped AdBlock when they decided to let companies pay to be unblocked.

RequestPolicy FTW - unlike those other plugins, it is a whitelisting system so nobody slips through just because they are new. It is also site-specific, so if you want to load up disqus from one site but not any others, you can.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/

Downside? You have to be more involved by manually whitelisting the necessary sites like CDNs. I've been using it for years and it doesn't bother me, although I'd say 5% of the time I'll just give up rather than work through a list of 10+ cross-site references.

Thank you! I much prefer whitelisting, but had not known about this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com