Talk:Ghostery

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Ownership

The product an brand Ghostery (c) is now owned by Cliqz International GmbH, a German based company. Ghostery Inc. renamed to Evidon and focuses on B2B compliance services. The German company Cliqz focuses on privacy (anti-tracking) and does not sell user-data of any kind. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.120.14.158 (talk) 02:01, 22 February 2017 (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

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)

You're absolutely correct, it IS the principle of the thing. I, also, was very hopeful that this software would help with transparency and limit tracking. Instead, it seems that they want to choose WHO tracks you, to the benefit of the advertising partners of Ghostery, or whatever the current name of their parent company. They haven't been acquired, it seems, but change their name and explain with doubletalk. Their usage stats are not transparent, nor is their business model, and when I attempt to to disable/delete their software, they act very much like malware. As the man said, "If it walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, ..." 205.197.242.187 (talk) 03:48, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Free and open-source software, Mozilla Public License, and Ghostery's end-user license agreement

Currently, Ghostery is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Although their website hosts an end user license agreement, that page is not presented to users prior to installation, and users are not given an opportunity to read or accept it. Ghostery is also hosted in the extension directories of supported browsers (e.g. Firefox Add-ons, Chrome Web Store, Microsoft Store, Opera add-ons). Among these listings, the Firefox add-on explicitly states that Ghostery is licensed under the MPL 2.0 (with no mention of the EULA), and the other listings don't comment on licensing. Additionally, Ghostery offers direct downloads of their browser extensions through their GitHub releases page. That page is linked to their repository, which mentions only the MPL 2.0 and not the EULA.

Altogether, since the EULA appears to be unused while the MPL 2.0 licensing is prominently displayed, both Ghostery's source code and binaries appear to be free and open-source software licensed under the MPL 2.0. — Newslinger talk 07:35, 18 February 2019 (UTC)