Talk:Ghostery
 | This article was nominated for deletion on 10 June 2011 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep. |
Profitability
What is their business model? how do they make money? 15:32, 2 March 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lingust (talk • contribs)
Contested deletion
This page should not be speedy deleted because it does not fit under A7. Ghostery has been written about in international, as well as domestic press including the WSJ, NYT, Fox News, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, PCWorld, MacWorld, and more. The Firefox extension alone has more than 2 million downloads, the Chrome extension has more than 80k daily users. New references included, some modifications made. --ResolvedElement (talk) 19:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Download count
Does anyone know how Mozilla.org counts those? For instance, do they count as separate downloads updates automatically pulled by Firefox? Because if that's the case a software with many updates will automatically get more of these, so this isn't a very good measure of popularity. FuFoFuEd (talk) 18:45, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
- There is no way of knowing the actual stats, as the Ghostery authors have either opted out of the public tracking system, or they have hidden it from view. If it were enabled, it would be visible at this URL https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/9609 Does anyone know what the default choice is for the statistics panel, ie, opt-in or opt-out? 152.98.218.1 (talk) 03:20, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
License
What's the source code license? The infobox should say. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.62.92.11 (talk) 08:33, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
- Ghostery is regulated by an EULA. While quite liberal it might not quality for a free software license. You can verify this by downloading the plugin and extracting the (zip) file. There's a file named ghostery_eula.txt in there. I suggest modifying the article to reflect this. 194.54.31.24 (talk) 16:45, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
Is Ghostery Just Another Marketing Ploy?
Just wondering. Since Ghostery is owned by something called Better Advertising is it possible that G actually is a marketing program in disguise and that conflict of interest is why so many are having an issue with its ability to get rid of all the cookies when there are other programs out there that don't seem to have this issue?
Really, read their blog, people complain all the time that while some cookies are removed many, and often most, are allowed to remain. Just having checked mine, while one cookie was removed six remain. That's not what people download it for. Example:
So I read:
"It’s important to know that this kind of “3rd party tracking” is not necessarily a bad thing."
"With Ghostery, Better Advertising can provide companies and industry associations with a complete view of OBA usage." http://blog.evidon.com/2010/01/19/better-advertising-acquires-ghostery/
The above link also says that they don't use the info gotten from users to market, but I'm wondering what the true connection between Ghostery and marketers is and why they don't make that clear when hyping the product (after all, they do speak highly about "transparency"). Was the name change from Better Advertising to Evidon an attempt to hide a connection? Other clues are the strange questions when posting to the blog like "How does this make you feel?" which sounds almost like psychological profiling, and "Our employees are here to help". Employees? Understand, I'm not making an accusation but if people knew there was an undisclosed connection to marketers for purposes of tracking and/or advertising somehow I doubt they would be downloading it.
Perhaps someone will say that the connection is harmless and the tracking allowed is necessary for sites to "provide services", yet not only is this allowance of tracking unnecessary but that position is also highly misleading as I believe that most people download it under the assumption that Ghostery eliminates all tracking and is solely concerned with privacy when in fact Ghostery may be more concerned with "better advertising".
It's just the principle of the thing, though we are living in an increasingly Big Brotherish world privacy is still a basic human right not a privilege. Simply put people don't like to be tracked knowingly and especially unknowingly.
By the way, I tried to post a pared down version of this question on their site but the "Choose a topic" drop down menu wouldn't work so I couldn't post. 4.246.203.174 (talk) 16:35, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
Criticism
Some say that Evidon, the company owning Ghostery, plays a dual role in the online advertising industry. Ghostery blocks sites from gathering personal information. But it does have an opt-in feature GhostRank that can be checked to "support" them. GhostRank takes note of ads encountered and blocked, and sends that information, though anonymously, back to advertisers so they can better formulate their ads to avoid being blocked.[1] Thus not everyone sees Evidon's business model as conflict-free. "Evidon has a financial incentive to encourage the program's adoption and discourage alternatives like Do Not Track and cookie blocking as well as to maintain positive relationships with intrusive advertising companies," says Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford grad student and privacy advocate.[2]
Comments: there are several points here that are wrong - Ghostery does not collect personal data, it collects tracker information. - GhostRank is well explained in many places, here is a sample list: on the AMO and other download pages, during the startup wizard, in te options, on the web site, in the blog, and so on. - GhostRank is off by default - Evidon's customers cannot use the reports purchased from Evidon to target, improve the rates of blocking or non-blocking, or identify user. The only data available is info about tracker and web sites its been found on.
There are 2 referenced articles which try to establish connection between Evidon, Ghostery and advertising industry. While the connection exists, the articles are alarmist at best, bullshit at worst. Please reference above comment. Citing an opinion also does not qualify as NPOV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fixanoid (talk • contribs) 22:03, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
- Restored the reworked and expanded criticism section with better and more sources, including several established printed computer and technology magazines. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:35, 1 September 2013 (UTC)