Nice Fx extension probably run into the ground...

[polonus]

Hi malware fighters,

The privacy concerned may have heard about ghostery - a nice extension for Fx and Flock browser to make third party tracking bugs transparent. Now it has been sold to a party it was meant to make transparent, one could say nice extension lost to the "enemy":
A token on the wall, ghostery add-on sold to the firm it was meant against:
http://blog.betteradvertising.com/2010/01/19/better-advertising-acquires-ghostery/
So probably a very interesting Firefox add-on lost to the "enemy"....

Are we loosing the battle because of the attitude of younger generations that are less and less privacy concerned and are fully unaware of the risks?

polonus

[DavidR]

Ghostery has been kicked into touch on my firefox and not because of this. It has adverse reaction in 3.5.7 and by all accounts 3.6 also causing firefox to hang on exit, it took me ages to find that ghostery was responsible.

Whilst the window closes the process is still running in task manager, once disabled (and subsequently uninstalled) firefox shuts down promptly.

So for me no loss, but got rid of a thorn in my side since 3.5.7.

[Hermite15]

when the tracker hunter becomes a top notch tracker 

Why did we buy Ghostery?
Better Advertising will use data shared voluntarily by Ghostery users to understand the compliance and non-compliance of companies with the industry’s self regulatory principles. With Ghostery, Better Advertising can provide companies and industry associations with a complete view of OBA usage. This makes complying easier for companies, and furthers our mission of providing a more transparent, trusted environment for consumers and advertisers.

[polonus]

Hi Logos,

You could take betteradvertising.com into the AdblockPlus blacklist,
Ghostery was a good plug-in for finding out what to block with No-Script, and when NoScript could not block it because it was the main domain that was tracking, you could still block it through Ghostery.

Then again I think when something is good and working, why others have to come in and ruin the concept? Do not enable ghostrank, because that will send your info to Betteradvertising....
There are a lot of guys that do not have our best privacy interests at heart, I assume.
And then I more and more I think we have to go back the favorite method of our forum member, YoKenny , just go back to using an old reliable updatable hosts file to send all that is annoying \, unwanted or dangerous even to the 127.0.0.1 realm not to be bothered by it anymore on your machine ....

And so the circle is round and closes again,

polonus

[YoKenny]

And then I more and more I think we have to go back the favorite method of our forum member, YoKenny , just go back to using an old reliable updatable hosts file to send all that is annoying \, unwanted or dangerous even to the 127.0.0.1 realm not to be bothered by it anymore on your machine ....

And so the circle is round and closes again,

polonus

We old reliables get the work done in spite of the whippersnapper that thinks they know everything 

[polonus]

Hi malware fighters,

Why we have to go back to these more orthodox measures of blocking trackers with a hosts file that is harder to circumvent without a malware install?

Again this whole development of tracking analysis is just symptomatic for an overall development we see being carried out just before our eyes, the positioning of geo-location and HTML-5 for better profiling of the browser user (Google Chrome). On the one hand it has to do with commercialized user-tracking for ad-launching - on the other hand with monopoly positioning (new versus settled interests at the cost of the common user (Google versus Adobe's Flash, while they are officially denying this of course)).

With the browser user agent info combined with this and other data it is quite possible and easy to identify a unique user and with the aid of Super Cookies one could go on ad-tracking and profiling the browser-user unhindered by ad- and scriptblocking, but again then your analytic data have to be there, perfect and ready, and that is what can be performed with this method.


Seeing what data is being sent is even more interesting with aid of the add-on WASP, the Web Analytics Solution Profiler. It's also a Firefox extension, check it out at http://WebAnalyticsSolutionProfiler.com

polonus