[ds9]

Ghostery, the last time I checked it out was closed-source, subject to control or influence by advertisers, and reporting to the vendor about users' browsing. Clearly lots of people like it, but I would consider it gross breach of my security policy.

My recommendation for anyone who's serious about controlling his/her online footprint is Request Policy. It's open source and simply blocks requests according to user directions - you can put it on a whitelist or blacklist basis, and decide for yourself what servers to contact from each page. Of course this is too inconvenient for most people, but it gets asyptotically less troublesome as the list is perfected.

[bryans]

1. Closed-source javascript is not a thing, and Ghostery's code is very readable.

2. Technically, anything is subject to influence by third parties, but I'm quite certain you possess zero evidence that Ghostery is actually influenced by advertisers. Implying that Ghostery might do something nefarious at the behest of advertisers (based on nothing but personal paranoia) seems maliciously disinformational.

3. Ghostrank is opt-in by default. You have to intentionally check a box that plainly says you agree to send "anonymous statistical data" to them.

[fixanoid]

The source is not just very readable, we make it publicly available for review. Here are some links: - AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/files/browse/254748... - Chrome: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/

We are most definitely not influenced by third parties, if anything, companies now contact us directly to provide their registration information for monitoring by Ghostery. Additionally, we keep the database changes public here: https://www.ghostery.com/en/database/changelog

[joosters]

Ghostery doesn't default to phoning home, last time I installed it.

[codesuela]

FYI there is also Disconnect.me (Open Source see Github) and the EFF Privacy Badger (also Open Source)