Ghostery for Chrome v2.0

Download the new version now, click on options, and click the “Enable Bug Blocking” checkbox under Blocking Options.  Under the Blocking Options tab you can also establish your site whitelist, allowing scripts to execute on those domains even if you have blocking enabled.

You’ll notice that the blocking functionality is labeled experimental, which is due to the limitations of resource blocking in the Chrome API.

Ghostery for Chrome works like all resource interception extensions.  The blocking script is injected into the page as a script itself.  This means that as the page loads, Ghostery has to ask the background process for user preferences regarding blocking. So it’s possible that some scripts may execute while Ghostery and the browser are chatting, effectively letting them “sneak through” before the browser tells Ghostery you’d like to block them. We’re communicating with Chrome developers to understand the timeline for an extension API that will give Ghostery access to the script calls before they load (similar to the functionality in Firefox).  We’ll keep the Ghostery community informed of progress as we learn their plans.

We would love your feedback - give the new improved Ghostery for Chrome a test drive, and let us know what you think!  You can reach us via email or through our support forums.

As always, thanks for using Ghostery!

Happy Browsing,

Andy Kahl

Ghostery Product Manager

andy@ghostery.com

Duck Duck Go

Howdy Ghosterians,

One of the really valuable things about our Ghostery community is when users contact us via email or our support forums to give us the heads-up on scripts they think should be added to our database.  Our users have helped us find invisible scripts of all kinds, including behavioral data trackers, other ad tags, research and analytics pixels, and page widgets.

Occasionally, our detection reaches a little deeper than intended.  That was the case with Duck Duck Go, a search engine written and operated by Gabriel Weinburg.  Gabriel wrote a nifty “My Karma” widget that found its way into the database of detected Ghostery scripts.  That part’s okay - because while that script doesn’t do any kind of behavioral tracking, it does make some external calls to populate the widget data - so it fits in that category for Ghostery.

The problem is that our script detection also caught the functionality used for the Duck Duck Go search engine.  If you have the widget script blocked (or just choose to block all of the scripts in the Ghostery list), your Duck Duck Go searches wouldn’t work - which was a big bummer to users of both Ghostery and Duck Duck Go, and was never what we intended in the first place.  

The most important bit of info here is that we fixed it.  Block away - you won’t prevent Duck Duck Go searches anymore.  We’d also like to take this opportunity to make a suggestion - if you’re a Ghostery user, we’d bet you love Duck Duck Go. Not only is it a fast, fun search engine with a lot of features, it’s also built on a serious privacy platform.

Duck Duck Go with suggested first search string

Big thanks go out to the users that notified us of the trouble, and to Gabriel Weinburg, who was helpful (and patient) during the support process.

We’re working on functionality that will group scripts into categories, which should make understanding and selectively blocking those scripts a much easier proposition.  Keep an eye out for this feature in an upcoming release of Ghostery.

Happy Browsing,

Andy Kahl

Ghostery Product Manger 

andy@ghostery.com

Ghostery for Firefox v2.2.1

Hello Ghosterians,

We’re excited to announce the release of Ghostery for Firefox v2.2.1. Get it here!

Some improvements of note:

• added ability to whitelist local files per this suggestion
• Ghostery now recognizes frame-in-frame scripts
• added support for Firefox 4 betas
• added support for SeaMonkey 2.0 and 2.1

Also, the list of web bugs, trackers, widgets, and other scripts detected by Ghostery now stands at 249.  

As always, we appreciate feedback and suggestions from Ghostery users - it lets us continue to add features and fixes that you need and can use right away.

Got a suggestion or feature request?  Hit us up at support@ghostery.com or on the Get Satisfaction forum. You can also follow us on Twitter and be sure to check us out on Facebook.

Happy Browsing!

Andy Kahl

 Ghostery Product Manager

andy@ghostery.com

GhostRank and Better Advertising

Here at Ghostery, we’re excited about all the great things happening with our parent company, Better Advertising.  The Better Advertising platform is getting some attention, so we thought we’d distill things down for our users and explain how Ghostery fits in the big Better Advertising picture.

Better Advertising has been working with leading industry associations who have created, at the behest of the US Federal Trade Commission, a program to bring transparency and accountability to how interest-based (or behavioral) advertising is conducted.  We’ve developed a system that will enable the Better Business Bureau and the Direct Marketing Association to create an accountability program that will bring companies into compliance with the guidelines.  It’s something like a transparency report card for companies that serve ads based on an internet user’s interests.  News of our selection by these two organizations was in today’s Wall Street Journal.

GhostRank data is an important part of the platform.  Ghostery users who opt-in to GhostRank take a direct role in keeping the online advertising industry honest.  Ghostery thrives on our users identifying new trackers so that we can always provide the most comprehensive list of companies who are tracking consumers on the web.  Now, this data can be used to identify the good and bad actors in the advertising industry and to bring them into compliance with the principles put forth by the Federal Trade Commission.

As always, GhostRank data is completely anonymous and only used in aggregate - nothing changes in terms of our dedication to user privacy. In fact, user privacy across the web can now be preserved in a new, powerful way - and the Ghostery community represent the “feet on the ground” that make that happen.  

Thanks for using Ghostery and supporting these kinds of ground-breaking initiatives to increase advertising transparency.

Happy Browsing,

Andy Kahl

Ghostery Product Manager

andy@betteradvertising.com

White listing comes to Ghostery v.2.2

Ghostery V.2.2 for Firefox is now ready for download and comes fully loaded with bug fixes, and exciting new features to improve your user experience.

 Bug Fixes

- iGoogle page breaks with blocking on has been resolved.

 - Scripts interfering with Facebook operation while Facebook Connect is blocked have been resolved. This extends to blocking of ‘Like’ button data sharing across Websites.

 Note: We also recommend updating your Facebook privacy settings to prevent third party sharing for pages you’ve liked on Facebook. LifeHacker provides an excellent resource on updating Facebook here and here.

New Features

 - Ghostery Lite Mode: Reducing the number of identified, and blocked trackers, lite mode increases Ghostery’s speed by an average of 20%

- Block Log: With a database of over 200 trackers, reporting all blocked trackers on a page across multiple tabs, iFrames and sub-domains on a page on the 3 second pop up gets tricky. The block log exists to provide a detailed look into the nitty gritty of each page you browse.

- White listing: By popular demand, Ghostery now supports white listing of publisher sites you trust such as your bank on a domain basis.

We look forward to your feedback on the updated features. You can review us here, as well as by following us on Twitter.

 Thank you for using Ghostery!

Rose.

Community Manager

Ghostery News Roundup

It’s been a great Spring here in Ghosteryland, and we’ve had nifty new things sprouting up all over the place.  Here’s a quick run-down of interesting Ghostery tidbits, including an update on a couple of weeds we found and sorted out.

• Ghostery for Firefox v2.1.1 took care of the ugly authentication bug in our 2.1 release, and v2.1.2 includes a few more optimizations.
  • We tweaked the algorithm to get rid of page-load lag,
  • Ghostery no longer re-scans when you switch tabs, which will speed things up, and
  • We dig a little deeper, looking at up to three sub-domains inside iframes,  letting us detect trackers more often.
• We got some great mentions around the privacy universe, including a write-up in Linux Magazine, and  a great review at groovyPost.
• The arrival of Ghostery in the Chrome extension gallery followed with a lot of questions about when we’ll be able to support blocking in Chrome.   The Chrome developers are working on it, and you can track the progress here.  In fact, if you “star” that issue, it will let those devs know that there is a lot of interest in this feature and help them prioritize their work on it. 

As always, thanks for using Ghostery.  Got a question, tip, or feature idea?  Let us know.

Happy Browsing,

Andy Kahl

Ghostery Product Manger 

andy@ghostery.com

Ghostery v2.1 bug & fix

As many members of our Ghostery community have reported on our forums and via email over the last 24hours, there’s a glitch in the latest Ghostery release for Firefox, which when encountered prevents authentication to sites like web mail logins, online banking, and (perhaps the worst on a Friday night) Netflix.

The glitch is actually occurring during the upgrade process from v2.0.3 to v2.1, where some database identifiers are getting crossed and corrupted.  We have a fix, and are submitting it through the normal Firefox add-on channels today.

Ghostery Options For the Interim:

• Roll back to v2.0.3 while you wait for the updated release presently in the works
• Continue to use the v2.1, but follow the instructions below for refreshing the database links:

1. Click on the Ghostery icon -> Click on Options -> Go to the Blocking tab.
2. Select None, press Save.
3. Select All, press Save.
4. Restart Firefox.

We apologize for this inconvenience to your browsing experience, and as always, we really appreciate the community’s feedback on this in real time.

Please let us know if you encounter anything else out of sorts.

Thanks for using Ghostery!

Andy Kahl
Ghostery Product Manager

Ghostery Comes To Chrome and IE.

The Ghostery team has been hard at work on bringing you more control over your privacy across more browsers, and we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Ghostery extensions for both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.  Both Chrome and IE have differing personalities from Firefox, and Ghostery’s capabilities with each browser will vary as a result.

While Google Chrome’s API does not presently support blocking for third party extensions on its browser, we’ve got the ball rolling on helping you recognize who’s tracking you.

Ghostery for Google Chrome 1.0 provides:

• A robust capacity for detecting bugs, tracking scripts, IMG tags and iFrames, across a host of over 200 tracking companies.
• Access to the Ghostery database for more information on how the above tracking technologies use the data they collect, allowing you to make informed decisions on what cookies to block in your browser while we work on the blocking capacities for Chrome.

We’re looking forward to seeing our Chrome users’ rally Google to help make blocking a reality.

Internet Explorer provides a comprehensive set of tools to users for protecting their privacy, and you can now add Ghostery to this list, though support for third party extensions in Explorer is fairly limited by the browser at this time. We’ve built Ghostery for IE to detect subsets of all active trackers to counteract this hindrance.

            Ghostery for IE 1.0 Provides:

• Detecting subsets of all active trackers including scripts and bugs on a web page
• Access to the Ghostery database for more information on how identified trackers are using the collected data
• Blocking functionality for all identified scripts

Both extensions also provide access to the Ghostrank community, and access to updated bug lists on a weekly basis, which is provided on demand, as well as an opt-in automatic update to users.  As both browsers evolve their capabilities for supporting third party applications, we look forward to providing enhanced capabilities to both browsers. Compare browser capabilities side by side here .

A big thanks to the Ghostery community for providing such great feedback throughout the beta process and we look forward to your continued support and feedback.

Live! Ghostery V.2.1 for Firefox

The evolution of Ghostery under Better Advertising’s ownership over the last few months has been fast paced. The Ghostery team’s goal has been to bolster your capacity for bug free web browsing, which brings us to V.2.1 of Ghostery.

New in V.2.1:

• Refreshing your browser to implement option updates is no longer necessary - Ghostery now recognizes updates automatically.
• The Ghostery bug list has an automatic weekly update, available exclusively on an opt-in basis.
• An On-Demand bug list update is also available by selecting the Ghostery ghost.
• Detection of Flash and Silverlight cookies, with deletion available to users’ on an opt-in basis, where the selected domains are deleted upon browser closure.
• Detection of Web bugs embedded within IMG tags and iFrame page elements. Deletion of these tags is exclusively on an opt-in basis given blocking has the capacity to cause page breaks.

We’re thrilled with all the feedback we received on the initial Beta, which helped us finesse the final release. Keep the feedback coming and share your love for Ghostery with other users’.

Rose

Community Manager

Twitter.com/ghostery

It Takes A Village

Technology is a constantly evolving landscape. Staying ahead of the privacy curve means using tools like Ghostery to monitor who’s tracking your behavior online, as well as knowing for what purposes so that you can make informed browsing choices. One of the most rewarding aspects for the Ghostery team is the community’s active involvement towards reaching this goal by opting-in to Ghostrank so we can aggregate the major players in tracking, as well as discover new ones. Your questions, comments and suggestions all play a significant role in Ghostery’s continued evolution, and we really value your feedback. We take the responsibility of building a flexible tool that’s continually informing and assisting the community in managing privacy very seriously. We approach our work with this goal in mind every day, but we’re also not the only ones working on giving users a backstage pass to the Web. Some of you are building your own tools as well towards this effort.

Henrik Gemal, of BrowserSpy.dk, is one such person in the Ghostery community we’re thrilled to highlight.

BrowserSpy is an incredibly cool set of web-based tests “where you can see just how much information your browser reveals about you and your system.”  Combining analysis of HTTP request headers, browser cookies, and turning a couple of little Java and Flash tricks on themselves, Henrik shines a light on some otherwise dark corners of the browsing experience.

There are seventy-two (yes, 72) detection tests available at BrowserSpy, ranging from spelling out your browser type and capabilities, to fetching its supported system colors and the fonts you have installed.  It’s important to note that BrowserSpy doesn’t suggest that these tests reveal violations of privacy per se - but rather provides a robust picture of how your browser can open a window of visibility into your system.  Whether you want to open things up for some fresh air, or tightly draw the shades - BrowserSpy is another valuable tool in your privacy arsenal, provided for free at www.browserspy.dk.

It really does take this global village of Ghostery users to keep development moving and we can’t do it alone, so let us know what else you’re working on to make the internet a more privacy friendly place and we’ll feature it here.

Regards,

Rose

Ghostery Community Manager