Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.
Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
Choose to block - or not. You get control at a company level - are there some marketers you trust, but others you'd rather turn away? Ghostery lets you open the valve of your web behavior as wide or as narrow as you'd prefer.
Ghostery and Disconnect are essential privacy tools in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. Also try ShareNot on Firefox, which is experimental, but has somewhat more extensive blocking coverage than Disconnect.
But more fundamental: don't log in unless you have to, log in only in private browsing windows or separate browsers from your other surfing, and also clear your cookies often to keep your not-logged-in browsing cleaner from a privacy perspective.
Just a note: Neither Ghostery or Disconnect work in Chrome, since Chrome doesn't have any kind of ability to block requests from being made. The experimental webRequest API should help with that, but it hasn't been released yet.
can you clarify? both ghostery and disconnect do install and run in chrome - i have them running now. are you saying that there is some particular functionality that they don't provide?
also, responding to the (grand) parent, someone else mentioned that flash cookies are cross-browser. so if fb uses those you need to also make sure that the fb browser doesn't have flash installed.
They both install and run, but they use beforeRequest and edit the page content. This works in theory, but in practice there is no guarantee that the script will be loaded into the page before the tracker assets are. The ghostery/disconnect addons succeed in blocking trackers sometimes, but not all. Ghostery handles it a bit better than Disconnect does, as it will actually tell you which trackers it was able to block and which it wasn't.
The experimental webRequest API will solve that by providing a synchronous way for scripts to deny/allow connections before any requests are made, but webRequest won't be made available to non-experimental addons for a few months at the minimum.
Another very useful addon in Firefox is the RequestPolicy plugin, which blocks requests to other sites. You have to explicitly allow a site to connect to Facebook or Google analytics.
The only downside is that it is sometimes a hassle on pages that integrate third-party payment solutions which often have a lot of redirects and off-site scripts and iframe content. But then, like in noScript, you can always allow all or some request types from a page permanently.
I use noscript, ghostery and requestpolicy, but so far, I haven't managed to integrate requestpolicy into my daily browsing (I have it set to 'allow all' with a few blacklisted sites) because it's too much effort to figure out exactly what is needed by every single website.
It's hard enough with noscript to randomly guess at what should be allowed for a given site. You take a guess, then slowly expand the number of temp permissions til the site eventually loads properly.
Came across Ghostery professionally earlier this month, seems to be quite primitive in it's detection which surprised me. A site I knew to have tracking on didn't get picked up due, as far as I could see, a change in the filename of the tracking .js file. I was expecting it to track domains in a similar way to AdBlock.
I use Ghostery as well, but few people seem to be aware that you can also use AdBlock for this. Subscribing to the Fanboy (or EasyList) "Tracking/Stats Blocking" filter will block cross-site requests to sites like Google Analytics and Facebook just like Ghostery will.
It doesn't. Noscript blocks scripts and plugins from executing on the page and AdBlock blocks a specific list of ads.
Ghostery blocks a list of trackers such as google analytics, KISSmetrics, and facebook social plugins[1]. Ghostery generally won't affect the page at all except in invisible ways, but it will remove Like, Tweet, +1, etc buttons to prevent requests from being made to Facebook/etc.
You can also fine-grain set Ghostery to allow certain trackers, like Google+ buttons, while still blocking all the others.
Adblock with Easylist Privacy compares to this though. However you won't get ghostery's eye opening popup with it. I use both in conjunction just to be sure.
Quoting:
Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.
Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
Choose to block - or not. You get control at a company level - are there some marketers you trust, but others you'd rather turn away? Ghostery lets you open the valve of your web behavior as wide or as narrow as you'd prefer.