Blocking Google and Facebook using Ad Block Plus and Ghostery

Disconnect is an "of course"? I looked at their issues page and saw these two open requests that are basic requirements for me:

"Feature: option to manage Whitelist/Blacklist #272 -- The whitelist is being stored in JSON format in the FF prefs.js, this is really hard to manage manually. I'd like a basic dialog for Whitelist/Blacklist management of sites."

"Element hiding in Firefox #237 -- Implemented?"

Scanning the rest of the bugs it seems like they do a bad job of doing what HTTPS-Everywhere does extremely well and the graph of behavior-tracking websites looked like a crappy version of LightBeam.

I like Ghostery so far, but the Self-Destructing Cookies add-on looks excellent, thanks :). I just wish that it (and Ghostery) would not make obnoxious and useless notifications by default. Easy enough to change, though...

Is not needing to uncheck the box that says "allow non-intrusive ads" the only thing adblock edge has to offer?

Y'know, something more than a naked link is going to be just a smidge more useful and informative:

AreWePrivateYet recreates Stanford University's Tracking the Trackers: Self-Help Tools study on a continuous basis in a reproducible way. The above chart compares the level of protection provided by the different privacy extensions across various metrics.

Because I need cookies for all my logins and subscriptions. Ads I don't need and take up a lot of screen space.

I block third party cookies, Ghostery, and block Flash. I've even opted out on the various ad tracking opt out aggregators.

I still get shown ads correlating to other sites I've visited, searches I've done, or emails I've received on Gmail.

I searched for Niles and Russound multi-room audio one Friday last summer, and HTD.com (Home Theater Direct) has been showing me whole house amps everywhere I go ever since.

The third party cookie block doesn't seem to help much any more.

That's a pretty bold claim to make.

If third-party scripts or images are still being requested, then what prevents a site- and/or page-specific identifier from being included in the URLs of those assets? And what then prevents those site IDs, page IDs, the IP address you used to make the requests, your user agent's User-Agent string, the Referer header values, and other identifying information from being collected and stored? What prevents them from them from then tying this information together in a way that tracks you and your browsing behavior?

Keep in mind that cookies of any type are not at all necessary for such tracking to occur. The only way to truly avoid that kind of tracking is to not make any such requests in the first place.

Not so much. AFAICT anything including an IFRAME to Google (e.g. a map) will set their tracking cookie, and anything fetched from any of their servers will probably try to identify you via browser fingerprinting. To do anything that really matters, you need to block the HTTP requests.

I... think it's kinda weird, yelling for 'anti trust regulation' when you're blocking ads / denying people their income.

I use ABP + Ghostery and most Google ads do not qualify as unobtrusive (I don't use FB). I can't recall having seen a Google ad since installing ABP probably not too long after the new policy (I installed Ghostery a few months later IIRC). E.g. the ads at the top of searches are gone, which is great for me since I use redshift and can never tell where the ads stop and the results begin when it is shifting (it is also nice to not need to scroll down to see actual results, although the re-search as text is entered into the search box thing annoyed me enough that I switched to DDG). For people who installed ABP after the option was added it is well documented.

I think ABP came up with a good list that actually indicates when ads have minimal negative impact. Does following those rules actually harm independent content creation? Before installing ad blocking it was not at all infequent for me to not look at websites at all because the ads were too obnoxious. OTOH, when I find an article valuable I usually look around more at what the site has to offer and would at least see the less obtrusive ads at that point even if I missed them earlier.

RequestPolicy is pretty awesome. I've switched to Adblock Edge, which hopefully protects me better than Adblock Plus. Unfortunately, the more I delve into web privacy, the more I think that non-technical users are screwed. How on earth are mere mortals supposed to protect themselves when someone skilled in the art has a difficult time getting web sites to work in a privacy-maximal fashion?

I honestly don't understand why RequestPolicy doesn't get more love from the pro-privacy crowd. It does exactly what they want: prevents sites from issuing HTTP requests to other sites.

I once used a rather ambitious collection of addons, and I've since reduced it to just NoScript and RequestPolicy. And NoScript actually allows Javascript everywhere; it just has the XSS filter enabled. As a result, the vast majority of websites (with a categorical exception, below) work without any fiddling, and I don't see any third-party content at all: advertisements, share/like/+1 buttons, etc.

My only complaint about RequestPolicy is its lack of wildcard domain matching. I'd love to allow access from all sites to 'x.cloudfront.net', but that's not possible in the current version. (Rumour is that this is being fixed, and while I can confirm that wildcards are supported in the alpha version, it's definitely not ready for real-world usage yet.) Unfortunately, this means that some sites just don't work right; eg. 'x.blogspot.ca' always renders oddly, because they all pull from 'blogblog.com' and 'blogger.com'.

Probably. They're pretty open about their business model -- gather data about where ads get served, and sell that to the people buying those ads. As long as a minority of people use Ghostery, they can keep making money.

The only real way to control tracking is via an HTTP proxy that blocks connections to known bad actors (e.g. Google). Keeping an up-to-date list of miscreants is a pain, but doable. Ghostery does this for you, for a price.

From https://www.ghostery.com/privacy:

"Ghostery does not collect any data by default. You may choose to send us data by enabling the Ghostrank™ feature."

Isn't it called the AntiSocial list?

Whatever the name, it's a great feature. Thanks!