Ghostery: Letting the wolves look after the sheep?

http://www.betteradvertising.com/our_partners.html

http://www.warburgpincus.com/

 

Ghostery was taken over by Better Advertising about over a year ago already. Anyway, I think it is not such a big deal. There is a statistics "phone home" option, but it already existed in old builds from the original developer and you have to enable it yourself.

In these threads is some discussion about the acquisition and the addon itself:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=278262
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=273260

 

Thanks for the info! Still, it would be nice to have an open source addon with this functionality that does not rely on industry involvement and venture capital. After all, the idea is to keep capitalist pollution of the public sphere (advertising and data gathering) out of the media experience, not to invite them back in through the backdoor.

 

I have always had slight reservations about the acquisition of Ghostery. However, they are really trying to develop the add-on & seem to be working quite hard to make it work. It has had its problems, it works really well now on SeaMonkey/Firefox although I think it is still a little sluggish on Safari 5.

It does, at first glance, seem to be a genuine case of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I think that a bit too much has been made of this acquisition though & it has led to all sorts of paranoid speculations.

Of course, I could just be being naive ...

 

Ghostery is about 'Internet Tracking' not Capitalism....

 

Even though i use it, i'm surprised nobody else has developed/released something similar without the "connections" to industry etc !

 

There was a lot of opinions of Ghostery's acquisition by Better Advertising. But I assume that, since this is a FF addon, anyone with some skills could take a very careful look at it to see if it is doing something other than it claims to do. Until I hear something specific, I will keep using it. I have always been on the fence when it comes to the blocking of all ads. I find Ghostery a nice compromise. Btw, I am using Linux and am more concerned about privacy than security.

 

Evidon, formerly known as BetterAdvertising, published Ghostery's source code:
http://news.ghostery.com/2011/02/18/our-code-is-open/