Talk:Ghostery

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?

http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0.html?query=cookies&tag=srch&searchtype=downloads&filterName=platform%3DWindows&filter=platform%3DWindows

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:

https://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/topics/ghostery_simply_isnt_working?utm_medium=email&utm_source=reply_notification

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. 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.

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)

The links reference still do not provide NPOV since you are linking to opinions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fixanoid (talk • contribs) 17:02, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Fixanoid, this is not how it works in Wikipedia. We strive hard for a neutral point of view, but this does not mean that every single source needs to be neutral, they just need to be reliable. The provided sources are highly reliable sources per our standards (WP:RS), so it is legitimate to include them. The text in the criticism section (of which I am not the original author, BTW) is backed up by these (as well as many other) sources - I have checked this to be the case after your repeated removal. Furthermore, studying these sources I have found them to be quite neutral in themselves as well, they do not bash the product and just state facts, findings and their opinion, for the most part based on facts. Nevertheless, I have also included what Evidon says about their product, so that both points of view are discussed in the criticism section. This is how we avoid undue weight (WP:UNDUE) and achieve a neutral point of view (WP:NPOV) in Wikipedia.

Based on some of your comments, you seem to be affiliated with Evidon or Ghostery. Therefore please study the information I gave on your talk page very carefully so that your conflict-of-interest (WP:COI) does not interfer with your editing on Wikipedia.

Finally, if you continue to revert other editors without them violating our policies and guidelines, this may easily lead to being blocked from editing. I hate to say this to a new editor, but since all your actions so far have been reverts of other people's contributions and you hit the 3-revert-rule (WP:3RR) already, I think, it is important to make you aware of this now before it is too late.

Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:29, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

As the original author of the Criticism paragraph I would like to add a few words. I've seen this reversal dispute going on for a couple of days now. I intended to respond, but as I'm not very experienced in Wikipedia standards and technics, I was not really sure how I should deal with Fixanoid's comments.

I believe it is relevant to have an entry that goes into Ghostery's and Evidon's business model more explicitly. Much of the original Criticism text is not really contradicted by Fixanoid's comment. Both comment and original text agree that Ghostery does not collect personal data and that GhostRank is an opt-in feature, off by default. Also the comment admits that a connection between Evidon, Ghostery and the advertising industry exists. So, then why bother to remove it?

The point seems to be that different parties hold different views on whether Evidon's dual role implies a bigger conflict of interest than Evidon, in spite of all its transparancy, would admit. I have no final judgement on this issue myself, but for a critical start it is really not a weird thought that any company's real intrest is where the real money is. Which is with the online advertising industry in the case of Evidon. So I think it is relevant to address this issue. Now it may be true that opinions are not NPOV. But the fact that critical views exist, and not so in some obscure corner of the internet, is. I also think that putting down the referenced articles on a spectrum between 'alarmist' and 'bullshit' is an inappropriate frame. These articles may voice a critical view, but are really not that bad. I agree with Matthiaspaul that it seems that Fixanoid has a broader interest than just building a good encyclopedia.

I am glad Matthiaspaul made the effort of pointing out Wikipedia standards in a much better way than I could have done. I do not object to his expansions. And for balance of points of view, I think that it is only just that a reference to Evidon's FAQ is included.

Therefore I think that a Criticism paragraph should be included. Please consider this discussion before doing any further edits, let alone blunt reversals. Thanks -HaJeD (talk) 20:25, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Criticism Section

The entire criticism section is all based on one article: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516156/a-popular-ad-blocker-also-helps-the-ad-industry/ . This article was used as reference in the Criticism section. It was republished by mashable and that story was used as a reference in the Criticism section. The article was translated into German and hosted at heise.de/tr and that story was used as a reference in the Criticism section. The article was the sole source of a lifehacker post, and that post was used as a reference in the Criticism section. The German magazine Chip wrote an article apparently based on either the original Technology Review article or the translated version, this was used as a reference in the Criticism section.

The most damning claim against Ghostery came in the lifehacker blog post that claims "[Ghostrank] sends that information back to advertisers so they can better formulate their ads to avoid being blocked". This claim is not expressed anywhere else, and is not supported by the source article.

Every source except for the original technology review article should be removed from this section, and the unsupported claims should be removed. Onlynone (talk) 14:33, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

As the Ghostshare is an opt in were the web user actively has to reveil this information is hardly a risk compared to the unsolicited beakons and trackers. Those are not "opt-in" but come as a wanted or unwanted collateral. Theking2 (talk) 14:05, 17 January 2015 (UTC)