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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Greetings. I nearly have the same policy, regarding surfing and my addons.

I would only advise against Ghostery, as they whitelist some trackers, if being paid. With every update I had to reselect these trackers.

And Evidon (Ghostery's mothership) selling usageinformation really bugs me: http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/31/ghostery-a-web-tracking-bl...

I would recommend the FF-addon Diconnect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/

Does anybody have an idea, how I could make my own sites secure in a relatively cheap way? Just a personal site with not that much traffic, so spending much money seems a bit off to me.

Ideas?

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This.

I work on Disconnect. I don't understand why any hacker would still put Ghostery on their machine:

* Ghostery is run by former ad execs (7/9ths of their executive team): http://www.evidon.com/our-team

* They make their money (I've heard tens of millions of dollars per year) selling user data to ad co's and data brokers: http://www.evidon.com/#block-views-from_our_partners-block

So this is awesome, Ghostery has been a unsettling compromise for years now. I'm very happy to learn that you guys are doing it right. Thank you!

I've never been able to detect any nefarious network traffic caused by Ghostery (and I've looked), but I don't like the games they play, so I'll be pleased to ditch them without ceremony.

Ghostery's game seems to be tricking users into sending their data to Evidon. Going off the company's own numbers, something like 45% of Ghostery users send Evidon data (by comparison, only 2% of Firefox users share data through Telemetry).

Ghostery's default setting is to disable submitting data. You have to explicity opt-in. How is that tricking?

I was interested in your project but your smearing of 'competitors' with FUD is seriously disconcerting.

Congrats on your first post! [1]

1. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/astroturfing.html

Congrats on the non-answer.

Sadly, Disconnect detects less trackers than Ghostery (e.g. 5 vs 7 on washingtonpost.com).

I also like how Ghostery provides URLs for each tracker source (actual payload) that you can easily view on their site.

There's also a database with short description, affiliations and privacy terms for each tracker (e.g. https://www.ghostery.com/apps/google_analytics).

I really appreciate an ethical alternative to tainted Ghostery and hope you guys will catch up soon.

Not true, Disconnect detects 13 trackers on http://www.washingtonpost.com/. If you're running multiple filtering extensions all at the same time, install order matters as far as which extension sees which HTTP requests.

oh, interesting - can you explain the details? is it simple or random? if i install disconnect and then ghostery wil ghostery help with anything disconnect misses or is it more complicated than that? thanks!

As of the last time I tested:

* Chrome, Safari, and Opera give precedence to the newest extension - if that extension blocks a request, older extensions don't see the request.

* Firefox gives precedence to the oldest add-on.

ABP has several privacy lists that is managed publicly so I don't see the need for these untrusted and unproven extensions.

That's a pretty cheap shot:

* Disconnect has more than a million active users and Ghostery has more than two million.

* Disconnect is also as public as ABP: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect.

What was not blocked:

== Disconnect:

* s3.amazonaws.com

* cloudfront.net

* echoenabled.com

* troveread.com

* trove.com

== Ghostery:

* s3.amazonaws.com

* echoenabled.com

* platform.twitter.com

== HTTP Switchboard

* echoenabled.com

For HTTP Switchboard, I could easily identify glancing at the matrix that what was requested was a CSS file, I then proceeded to block with one click anything coming from `echoenabled.com`. The page still displayed properly for all three blockers.

Also of note, with Disconnect and Ghostery, there were some scripts running requesting data from api.echoenabled.com and echoapi.wpdigital.net every few seconds. These requests were blocked by HTTP Switchboard without my intervention to prevent this.

[You think maybe you should start identifying that you're promoting your own product with these comments?]

The first thing I tried when I wrote Disconnect was to block every third-party domain. Within an hour, I realized that I broke the whole web. So I built a crawler to identify and categorize the most prevalent third-party services instead. The domains you list under Disconnect would all be categorized as content by our crawler - resources that most people would consider pages broken without and that Disconnect doesn't block by default.

> "[You think maybe you should start identifying that you're promoting your own product with these comments?]"

Your going personal. I am talking about the extensions, not you. If for-profit companies are going to claim to care about user privacy, expect this claim to be taken to task, especially in the current era.

Above I am providing hard data, not an opinion.

> "The domains you list under Disconnect would all be categorized as content by our crawler"

The page works fine if whitelisting only the page domain. If someone want the comments, then it's a matter of whitelisting `echoenabled.com`. The rest doesn't appear so important, so I personally rather not ping them. But the point is, I am of the opinion that people need to have the ability to know exactly where their browser connects, then they can agree/disagree/not care. I don't see how one can make an informed decision without proper information.

Now regarding:

http://p.typekit.net/p.gif?a=219379&f=175.10294.10295.10296....

There is no way this 1x1 pixel gif would break a web page. And yet it's not blocked by Disconnect as reported in another comment below. I also reported how adobetag.com is reportedly blocked by Disconnect and yet a script from adobetag.com was downloaded by Disconnect.

Can't you appreciate why I am rather skeptical? Going personal rather than provide a credible answer is not going to dispel this skepticism.

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!

I get that you two are rivals, but he does have a point that you haven't addressed.

Ghostery seems to be in the business of selling the data that I forget to tell them they may not collect. This is intrinsically a sneaky thing to do.

Yes I know about and use the "default to blocking" setting, but I don't think there is much argument that Ghostery users download your software with the expectation that the default would be anything else. But it is. And that's sneaky.

So you offer a very useful product, for free, and make money off of the people who fail to configure it so that it performs the only service they would ever purposely download it for.

Again, I have sniffed Ghostery looking for violations of my configuration settings, and never found any. I believe that it follows its configuration settings, and I am thankful for its existence. And I recognize that development and maintenance of it is not free. Presumably you are not a volunteer.

I have gotten value out of Ghostery, but apparently that has been on the backs of other users who want the same thing, but are less-careful than me about reading configuration options, and that doesn't sit well.

You have to opt-in to 'Ghostrank' which is the data that they sell. I don't really see what's sneaky about this. Hell,if you click the 'see more...' toggle on the prefs page it tells you what Ghostrank does.

>Online marketing companies need better visibility into real-world applications of their technologies and those owned by their competitors. GhostRank data is sold as reports to businesses to help them market to consumers more transparently, better manage their web properties, and comply with privacy standards.

quesera described what's sneaky about Ghostery - their users think they're protected but aren't and don't know they're sending data to Evidon that the company sells but are:

> So you offer a very useful product, for free, and make money off of the people who fail to configure it so that it performs the only service they would ever purposely download it for.

I gave some numbers above that show, in practice, just how many users are in one of these unexpected configurations:

> Ghostery's game seems to be tricking users into sending their data to Evidon. Going off the company's own numbers, something like 45% of Ghostery users send Evidon data (by comparison, only 2% of Firefox users share data through Telemetry).

And how exactly is it trickery if users have to opt-in to the program and they're told what the program does?

[Replying to aroch, who's too nested.]

> And how exactly is it trickery if users have to opt-in to the program and they're told what the program does?

Ghostery seems to rely on vague messaging (last I looked, they don't actually say anywhere in their extension that they sell the data you share to ad co's and data brokers) and UX "optimization" (what quesera dubbed the "reconfigure-on-update dance", for example) to get less attentive users to leave blocking off and to send data - as the numbers show.

In the second paragraph (though really, its just a statement...) on the preferences page -- no need to navigate to another page, and they tell it to you in plain english. Once again, you have to opt-in, so if you opt-in without knowing what it does it's your own fault and you're being a dumb user:

When you enable GhostRank, Ghostery collects anonymous data about the trackers you've encountered and the sites on which they were placed. This data is about tracking elements and the webpages on which they are found, not you or your browsing habits.

Online marketing companies need better visibility into real-world applications of their technologies and those owned by their competitors. GhostRank data is sold as reports to businesses to help them market to consumers more transparently, better manage their web properties, and comply with privacy standards.

To be fair, if those recordings are time-stamped, it probably does leak information about user browsing habits.

Anonymizing data is hard.

Assuming they're adhering to privacy standards, the anonymization should be reported in aggregates and not like "{UUID} at {TIMESTAMP} reported {TRACKERS} at {URI}"

Actually, I'd completely forgotten about GhostRank, the opt-in data collection service. The sneaky part I was referring to was just the default setting to add new trackers but not block them. I don't think any users have the expectation that updates will work that way.

I'd argue that Ghostery should come with a default configuration of ALL trackers and cookies blocked. I'd argue even more strenuously that after the user configures Ghostery manually to do so, ALL should continue to mean ALL even after updates. Ghostery currently has 700 3P cookies in their database, and almost 1700 trackers. There is no valid argument, imho, that a user who configures to block ALL really means "block ALL right now, but if you see any new ones, I would really like to try them out first!"

However, I mostly agree that Evidon has been up front and straightforward about what they do and how they do it. I want to like Ghostery. I do like Ghostery. This little bit of sneakiness though, honestly, taints the whole operation. You can call it an oversight, and I will agree that it can't possibly have much marginal value to Evidon...but it's somewhere between tone-deafness and carelessness, two qualities that call for heightened vigilance.

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.

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.

So I just tried Disconnect. A few comments:

* I can't seem to see a list of all Google trackers. Some sites have multiple Google trackers, but if I click on the icon to see them it just turns off blocking for them. I'm assuming sites don't have 6 GA trackers, what are the others?

* I can't seem to turn off Content trackers for all sites. Configuring this site-by-site seems clumsy, to say the least.

Thanks.

#2 first: Code to block everything marked as content with one click was either just checked in or is about to be.

For #1: Disconnect groups tracking requests by company. If you want to see all the Google services that Disconnect filters, you could look through the filter list (services are grouped by category and company here, so start at lines 33, 1,882, and 2,326): https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/b27abbf033c6....

Why is the Disconnect trackers list (https://services.disconnect.me/disconnect.json, referenced in https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/master/firef...) an encrypted blob?

That seems to go against the OS nature of the project.

See the commit message at https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/commit/691897e21d....

The unencrypted list is at https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/b27abbf033c6....

And formatted as JSON at https://disconnect.me/services-plaintext.json.

The encrypted list is also trivial to decrypt with the SJCL code in https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/blob/master/firef....

Thanks! I was setting up a proxy for devices that can't use Disconnect or Adblock. I thought of adapting the Disconnect list to the proxy's block list, but a cursory reading of the source only showed the URL of the encrypted list.

Cool, ping me if you need help (byoogle everywhere).

Hehe, this makes me chuckle every time.

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

folks please don't downvote people when they're giving useful info. there is a button in the advanced section that makes blocking work by default on new data. that's useful to know - i've just enabled it, and you should too.

just because you don't like someone (likely based on one comment on a web site...) doesn't mean that they should be downvoted...

I didn't downvote him, but I can understand why others might.

His comment seems willfully ignorant of the problem, which is that Ghostery calls itself a tracker-blocker, but squirrels that obviously-desirable config option away under "advanced" settings.

If Ghostery was on our side, really and truly, that would be the default. Indeed, it probably wouldn't even be an option.

Of course when the tracker list is updated, I want to block the new ones!

No post on HN, no matter how helpful, correct, and civil, changes that this operating model is essentially a trick.

I just spent 45 seconds explaining it, but it would have been faster, and pretty defensible, to just downvote.

On the other hand, nuking his comment into gray-land would obscure useful instructions for making Ghostery do what it is assumed to do in the first place. So I agree, downvoting here is destructive.

> His comment seems willfully ignorant of the problem, which is that Ghostery calls itself a tracker-blocker, but squirrels that obviously-desirable config option away under "advanced" settings.

Err, the option under Advanced just lets you set it to auto-block new elements as they're added. When you first install Ghostery, the walk through lets you pick that option as well without having to be "advanced" (oo, scare quotes!) in your preference setting.

"advanced" here is a string literal, not an adjective, so it belongs in quotes.

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.

> Ghostery does not call itself a tracker-blocker, our users do.

Sorry, I cannot accept that answer.

From your home page, in big letters, right now:

https://www.ghostery.com/

  > Knowledge + Control = Privacy
  >
  >    See which companies are tracking you
  >    Block over    1 6 0 0    trackers
  >    Learn how they track
  >    Ghostery is FREE

What do you call yourself then?

Please be honest with us. How do you view your operation internally? What services do you provide, and to whom?

Thank you.

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.

I appreciate you taking the time to reply in these threads.

I won't needle you with follow-up questions, but for the record, I think there's more than a little cognitive dissonance here regarding customers and conflicting goals.

This is why people who spend time thinking seriously about the issue are concerned about Ghostery, but I accept that "trust" doesn't pay the bills.

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.

Nice: First I would really prefere it, if my name was spelled right. That much of respect should have been the least to do.

But back on topic: Why should I (as fairly technically adapt person) have to search deeply inside the configuration, to maybe find a feature, that I expect to be active by default?

So sorry - Ghostery is so far off my radar nowadays, as I felt tricked and victim of a dark pattern [1]. And as I nowadays have a strict "zero tolerance" policy regarding sites/services/tools that act this way. Ghostery was, is and will be on my list of tools, that I would never ever recommend to anybody.

Btw.: I do not mind downvoting - as it shows me, I must have done something right:

"Methinks thou dost protest too much." (English proverb)

[1]: http://darkpatterns.org/

Yes, Ghostery's origin story and reconfigure-on-update dance is bothersome. Thanks for the pointer to Disconnect, I will check it out.

Regarding your sites' security, what sort of advice are you looking for? OS-level hardening? Service config?

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