[ale] OT Ghostery FF privacy plugin feeds data to ad industry

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

The Ghostery firefox plugin has been mentioned here before as a useful tool in your security privacy toolkit.  A thread was started on the dc-404 list with the following link.  I then replied with some more links related to the issue as shown below.  Since some of you may use the product too, I decided to post it here.

(original link and comment)

Make sure you disable GhostRank.

Cookie-blocking browser plugin Ghostery feeds data to the ad industry

http://www.techspot.com/news/52948-cookie-blocking-browser-plugin-ghostery-feeds-data-to-the-ad-industry.html

http://preview.tinyurl.com/mcp4xwy

(my addition)

Thanks for that note. I'm a Ghostery user. That particular article didn't give a great deal of data. I dug up the following on Ghostery's website. After reading through this, I've decided to leave GhostRank on, since it improves the ability of the product to function by improving it's bug / cookie database. The data sent to the industry is anonymous and aggregate. Selling this data provides funds to allow Ghostery's parent company to continue to provide Ghostery to the users. I'm sure some readers will still choose to turn the function off, as is their choice.

https://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/topics/what_is_ghostrank
http://www.ghostery.com/faq#q14
http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023438

Sincerely,

Ron



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Ron Frazier
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