Ad-Blocker Ghostery Just Went Open Source—And Has a New Business Model

Dang...and I left ghostery for uBlock because the business model was lil fishy (being previously owned by Evidon) and now that its open source maybe I have to get back again....

*sight*...back and forth back and forth ...

 

"In December, the company announced it was going to begin using artificial intelligence to automatically detect new tracking scripts. That's a departure from the standard practice of comparing scripts that appear on a website to a predetermined list of unwelcome trackers. In other words, Ghostery now attempts stop trackers it hasn't seen before, ostensibly giving it a leg up on the competition."

WoW!

 

I don't believe what they said. Of course it doesn't matter because it's just my personal opinion. This kind of gimmicks usually mean that the user may pay a hidden/higher cost to use it. I'm sticking with uBlock Origin.

 

Yes it could be a trick...

I hope someone makes a non-biased comparison of both Ghostery and uBlock Origin.

EDIT:
Found this:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/20/ghostery_ublock_lead_the_antitrack_pack/

Tought from that article: Blocklist based blocking (even if doing it with regular expressions) will most probably max out as the lists grow bigger and bigger. So most probably future adblockers will all switch to heuristic or maybe mixed blocklist-heuristic mode of operation.

 

This reminds me of anti-malware evolution. Of course

 

You would think, right? It's exactly why the ever stupid opt-in opt-out model is full of pitfalls because of this type of confusion.

To not only respect peoples wishes but their privacy as well, everything should be opt-in, which means you are opted out by default. The reason they don't is simple. They want to catch as many people as possible unawares or those unwilling to drill down and find some hard to find check box somewhere.

 

Not sure what to think about this. I'm guessing in the future offers will be based on sites that you visit, so this tells me that Ghostery will want to track you while blocking all other trackers. It doesn't make them look good.

 

Lists are needed even with heuristic-based approach -- consider this list from Privacy Badger -- to fix the inevitable false positives which I feel are more likely with a heuristic approach.

By the way, regarding the new open source nature of Ghostery: its own database of trackers etc. -- which in my opinion is the most interesting value from an outside developer perspective -- is not being open sourced.

 

Ah, yes I see that now:
https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension/tree/master/databases

So this was all just some cheap marketing stunt from their part....

 

Good point, so I wonder what was the purpose of making it open source, what will developers get out of this?

 

Ghostery revamps its privacy-focused mobile browsers
September 19, 2018
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/ghostery-mobile-browsers/

 

The fact that Ghostery continues to ask to share browsing data tells me that this Cliqz company probably can not be fully trusted.