Since starting Ghostery last year my goal has been to provide my fellow consumers with a free service built on the principles of transparency and consumer control. I am proud of the overwhelming response to Ghostery; over the past year, over 2 million people have installed Ghostery and joined our community.
Over the past months, as my focus switched to my new company, Performable, I made the decision that Ghostery should be in the hands of those who can give it the resources it needs to grow. I am happy to announce the sale of Ghostery to Better Advertising. Better Advertising is a company started by a team of privacy and online advertising veterans whose goal is to bring trust and transparency to the online advertising industry by working with companies, industry associations and the FTC to bring the best privacy and transparency to consumers.
Preserving Ghostery’s principles of user control and data collection transparency were paramount for me in making this decision. That is why, of all the options for Ghostery, including various offers for acquisition, a sale to Better Advertising was clearly the right choice. It gives me great peace of mind to know that I am leaving Ghostery in the right hands. They will not use any data collected from Ghostery for any type of advertising, a promise they make explicit in their Mission Statement and Privacy Center.
I have prepared a short Q&A to answer some questions that might come up in the near future:
Will the Ghostery service be interrupted?
No. While we’re transitioning over to Better Advertising’s infrastructure, we will do everything possible to make sure it is seamless.
Do I have to do anything or make any changes?
No. In the short term nothing is changing that would require you to do anything on your end.
Will my data be collected and used for advertising?
No. Better Advertising’s services are built from the ground up to specifically avoid collecting any type of data that could be used for behavioral advertising. Better Advertising also publicly pledges never to use any data it collects for advertising
What will Better Advertising do with Ghostery?
Better Advertising is committed to growing the Ghostery community by extending Ghostery across more Internet browser versions, and providing new services and features to our community.
Will the service remain free?
Yes. We don’t see making any changes to the service for the foreseeable future.
The Better Advertising team and I will be communicating more information in the coming weeks and months. I will personally stay involved with Ghostery as I will remain an advisor to the Better Advertising team going forward. If you have any immediate comments or questions please send them to support [at] ghostery [dot] com.
Thank you all for your support. This has been an incredible experience!
Note: This was crossposted on my personal blog earlier today.
I was surfing around the 37 Signals site today when I noticed something odd. It looks like 37 Signals is selling access to its audience behavioral data to Media6°.
According to Media6°website they do the following:
Our patent pending algorithms and methods connect a brand’s existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers who are interwoven via the social graph. These bespoke Media6° segments are both completely customized for each advertiser and enormously scalable. They reflect high degrees of homophily, the tendency of like-minded individuals to cluster with other people who strongly resemble them.
These Media6° audiences, sharing powerful demographic and psychographic traits, have been proven to respond to advertising messages at rates dramatically higher than other targeting alternatives.
I can’t figure out why 37 Signals would be selling this information to ad networks. Please let me know if you do.
Quick update: I uploaded version 2.0.1 to the Firefox site last week. It’s currently in the sandbox awaiting review by the Mozilla editors before it’s released.
Count of blocked trackers is now displayed in the status bar if blocking is enabled.
Options screen is now split into 2 tabs. This fixes a bug where some of our users couldn’t save their changes because the dialog box was too big for their screen size.
Added definitions for: WidgetBox, Clearspring, Navegg and Google Website Optimizer.
Bug fix: Russian translation now working.
Bug fix: Fix for CSS issue that was causing Ghostery to interfere with the Bookmarks “folder selection” dialog and some other plugins.
I’m pleased to announce the release of Ghostery for Firefox v2.0!
You can get the latest version here, or if you already have Ghostery installed, simply wait for Firefox to automatically notify you of the update.
NEW: Ghostery TrackerBlock - Block advertising, widgets, and other trackers
You’ve all been asking for the ability to block trackers for a long time. I am very happy to annonce that “TrackerBlock” is finally a part of Ghostery.
The release of TrackerBlock is the first step to providing you with a comprehensive set of tools to protect your privacy and to manage your relationships with 3rd party advertising, behavioral targeters and web analytic services.
Here are few screenshots that show TrackerBlock in action:
Other new stuff in Ghostery for Firefox v2.0:
Support for Russian language added.
New definitions:
Statsit
LeadForce1
BackType Widgets
iPerceptions
SearchForce
Tweetboard
TweetMeme
Zendesk
INFOnline
RichRelevance
LiveInternet
visitrac
BLVD Status
Clixpy
Logdy
DoubleVerify
ViziSense
phpMyVisites
Xiti
Yandex.Metrics
AdRiver
SpyLog
RapLeaf
ClickFuel
Alexa Metrics
Refined definitions:
Microsoft Atlas
Tacoda
Tell-A-Friend
Finally I want to thank Jon Pierce for contributing the blocking code and Sergey Fomin for contributing the Russian translation.
Crazy Egg, brought to you by the masterminds behind Kissmetrics, has more paid customers than WebTrends a pioneer in the Web Analytics world that was founded in 1993.
Please let me know how can we make these reports better.
Methodology: This data was compiled via the GhostRank submissions of our users. Thanks to all of you who have opt-ed into sharing the bugs you find with the community none of this could be possible without your contributions.
GhostRank is an opt-in feature included in Ghostery that allows users to submit the bugs they find across the web.
Today we measure the existence of web bugs on a per-domain basis (E.g. google.com, wordpress.com, etc). What this means is that sites like “tumblr.com” and “blogspot.com” would only count as one site when in reality there are 1000s of sites hosted on those platforms under subdomains, i.e. “ghostery.tumblr.com”.
Future versions of our tracker reports will be based on subdomains in order to more accurately measure “website” distribution.
Next up is our Top 10 Web Analytic Trackers report. Please let me know how can we make these reports better.
Methodology: This data was compiled via the GhostRank submissions of our users. Thanks to all of you who have opt-ed into sharing the bugs you find with the community none of this could be possible without your contributions.
GhostRank is an opt-in feature included in Ghostery that allows users to submit the bugs they find across the web.
Today we measure the existence of web bugs on a per-domain basis (E.g. google.com, wordpress.com, etc). What this means is that sites like “tumblr.com” and “blogspot.com” would only count as one site when in reality there are 1000s of sites hosted on those platforms under subdomains, i.e. “ghostery.tumblr.com”.
Future versions of our tracker reports will be based on subdomains in order to more accurately measure “website” distribution.
Let me know what you think of these reports and how I can make them better.
Thanks!
David
Methodology: This data was compiled via the GhostRank submissions of our users. Thanks to all of you who have opt-ed into sharing the bugs you find with the community none of this could be possible without your contributions.
GhostRank is an opt-in feature included in Ghostery that allows users to submit the bugs they find across the web.
Today we measure the existence of web bugs on a per-domain basis (E.g. google.com, wordpress.com, etc). What this means is that sites like “tumblr.com” and “blogspot.com” would only count as one site when in reality there are 1000s of sites hosted on those platforms under subdomains, i.e. “ghostery.tumblr.com”.
Future versions of our tracker reports will be based on subdomains in order to more accurately measure “website” distribution.
I just uploaded Ghostery v1.5 to the Mozilla Add-ons site. The Mozilla editors still need to review it in order to approve it, I hope that will happen soon.
You can download the latest version from here, current Ghostery users can just wait for Firefox to automatically notify you of the update.
What’s new in v1.5:
We’ve added a new notification system. Now you’ll be able to click on the ghost icon in your statusbar to see which trackers were found on the current page. [see screenshots in slideshow]
An entirely new Ghostery website is here. From the new menu you can click on the “What is X?” links to be taken to the new Ghostery Directory where you can learn what this tracker does, who owns it, see how popular it is via GhostRank data, leave comments and rate the tracker. [see screenshots in slideshow]
You can now get to Ghostery’s Options screen and other links right from your browser’s Tools-> menu. [see screenshots in slideshow]
A common request from our users was to be able to see the source of the trackers we find. Now you can see a cached version of the tracker source. [see screenshots in slideshow]
Modified or added definitions for Yahoo Web Analytics, Tynt Tracer, i-stats, Snoobi, Rocket Fuel, ShinyStat, VisiStat, NedStat, Acerno, Mindset Media, GoDaddy Site Analytics’, AdNexus, AlmondNet, Collective Media, eXelate, Fox Audience Network, interCLICK, NextAction, Traffic Marketplace, Turn, Real Media, etracker, Comscore VoiceFive, AddThis and Bizo.
[Bug fix] Fixed problem with German and Spanish translations not working properly.
The biggest surprise to me is to see how vibrant the Ghostery community has become so quickly, thank you all. I can’t wait to set the community loose on v1.5 and the new Ghostery Directory!!
P.S. If you use Ghostery, please consider posting a review here. Thanks for your support and feedback, it means a lot to me!
