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Comment by Ihmahr | Hacker News Reader

Disconnect is a great open source alternative to Ghostery: https://disconnect.me/

It also appears to lag Ghostery and Adblock in efficacy [1]. Granted, AreWePrivateYet is "presented by Ghostery." But Ghostery does not necessarily show up at the top of the list every month (see November 2013). AreWePrivateYet also uses a Stanford study's methodology [2] for its open-source model [3].

Update: Ghostery appears to outperform Disconnect even when both are put in "block all trackers" mode [4].

[1] http://www.areweprivateyet.com

[2] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2011/09/tracking-trackers-...

[3] https://github.com/ghostery/areweprivateyet

[4] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Comparative-...

Ghostery’s results are (surprise) quite biased: http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1kagfu/which_privac...

My results are not biased:

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Comparative-...

Ghostery does a better job than Disconnect.

Not true. You’re changing Ghostery’s default settings but not changing Disconnect’s default settings.

> You’re changing Ghostery’s default settings but not changing Disconnect’s default settings.

I believe this was appropriately accounted for. "Ghostery and Disconnect were set in their respective equivalent of 'Block all trackers' mode."

https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Comparative-...

For none of the extensions measured I had to go out of my way to set them in block all mode (mine is definitely still geeky compared to others -- it's more suited for the NoScript/RequestPolicy crowd).

I just re-installed all of them, and now I find they are all easier than ever to set up at install time. I had to tamper with Disconnect defaults months ago when I installed it, just like Ghostery and ABP. I appreciate it's no longer required.

If I adopt your arbitrary rule it would be pointless to do comparative measurements of privacy protecting power. I rather click once on a button at install time in a wizard (ABP, Ghostery) to be able to perform meaningful measurements than having to adopt a nonsensical methodology which would provide no useful information to end users.

Rather than dismiss the results, I think you should reproduce it and make a diff to find out what Disconnect doesn't block, and see how it can be improved. Maybe I will work toward finding more about this in the next benchmark.

lol

In addition if you already have adblock, you can add the privacy list to your subscriptions:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

Also addons like requestpolicy and self destructing cookies are beneficial.

I thought Privacy Badger would be better, no?

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