Ghostery: block web tracking
Ghostery is a free browser plugin that lets you block various scripts embedded in web sites. Many of these scripts attempt to track our browsing habits and report this info back to advertising networks and others that are interested in our personal activity on the web.
There are versions available at the Ghostery download page for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers. Their FAQ page provides some background on their efforts to “create the web’s most capable and comprehensive user privacy tool.” I have installed it in my browsers and I’m amazed at how much tracking activity is going on at most web sites.
Below is a screen shot from my visit today to the Gigaom tech news site showing the Ghostery popup list of network scripts that attempted to run but were blocked. You can configure the tool and selectively exclude things that you want to allow to run—I don’t block Google Analytics, for example, because I use it myself to get traffic info for my site, but this is not for advertising purposes, it’s only to see how many visits I receive and where they originate from (no personal identifying data of any kind).
Filed under: Marketing, Security & Privacy, Software Tags: advertising, browsers, data | No Comments »
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