At the very least, it’s the one that exists. Having a tool to remedy that on sites you don’t trust-one that also makes it easy to white list the sites that you do, helping them keep the lights on in the process-seems like as good a balance as one can expect. Hidden online trackers still permeate the web more than most people would ever realize. It’s also true, though, that many ads remain obtrusive and, in some cases, vehicles for malware and other digital ills. There’s a larger debate around ad blockers, of course, and their impact on various industries, like media, that largely rely on advertising to survive. “Likewise, Safari anti-tracking is impressive, but doesn’t take very stringent steps toward aggressive user privacy.”Īs for Firefox, its parent, Mozilla, has a stake in Cliqz, which again, owns Ghostery, so in some ways it’s all in the family. We don’t have a vested interest,” says Tillman. We don’t have that same sort of bias against what we choose to block and unblock. “The Google ad blocker, there’s speculation that it’ll be somewhat selective. “These are educators, professionals, who use it in their work to analyze websites and analyze the technology on them.” “There’s a really big chunk of Ghostery users who use it less for the detection and blocking and more for the insights they get,” says Tillman. Whereas Ghostery and its previous parent company, Evidon, have historically sold its (repackaged, anonymized) data back to the ad industry and other interested parties, in the future it hopes to focus instead on establishing a premium tier of service as its main revenue driver. The Cliqz acquisition has an ancillary benefit for Ghostery users as well, in the form of, eventually, a new business model. If Ghostery detects that users start refreshing a page over and over, for instance, something’s probably broken, and an adjustment can be made. But Tillman says that there, too, algorithms can help. Sniping page elements before confirming that they’re ad trackers has potential downsides a false positive, for instance, could result in usability being borked. And a significant amount of the traffic that’s free of third-party trackers belongs to Google and Facebook, which hardly need them to know what you’re doing online. A newly released Ghostery study shows that over 15 percent of pages loaded online have 10 more more trackers working in the background. The power-up comes at an auspicious time. In doing so, the Edward Snowden- endorsed service has become both more accessible to the average user, and better able to preemptively protect them. With Ghostery 8, available Wednesday as an extension for all the major browsers, the popular ad-blocker introduces not only AI-powered anti-tracking technology, but also a new “Smart Mode” that adjusts settings for you, rather than expecting novices to know which trackers to toggle. With its latest release, popular ad blocker Ghostery attempts to solve that common dilemma, with a fashionable solution: artificial intelligence. This means they largely share the same drawback, as well they can’t block what they’ve never seen before. Most ad blockers-and there are so, so many of them now-operate roughly the same way, comparing the scripts they encounter on a given site to their whitelist and block list letting the former run and stopping the others.
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