Senior Village Idiot at BottomFeeder LTD.

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  • 7 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2023

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  • @girlfreddy @aeternum

    Sigh… now that I am home I am able to open the Wired article. The second link is to a vice.com article which says:

    “Ghostery 6.0 is a from-the-ground-up re-imagining of how to design a privacy-enhancing browser extension so that its features are more easily accessible to a mainstream audience.”

    In other words, this is NOT their old version, and it says nothing about any previous versions, ownership, management, or financing of the product. The fourth link in the article is to another Wired article:

    https://www.wired.com/2016/03/heres-how-that-adblocker-youre-using-makes-money/

    Which states:

    “Ghostery, another popular ad blocker, operates under a different model. As a user, you don’t see ads and aren’t tracked by pesky data trackers. The company, however, makes money by collecting anonymized data on what those trackers pick up. It repackages that data and resells it to publishers, websites, and other companies it says can use the information to help improve the speed, privacy, and performance of their sites.”

    Followed by a footnote that says:

    “UPDATE 3:47 PM ET 03/02/16: This story has been updated to accurately reflect that Ghostery does not collect the same data that third-party trackers collect, but rather collects and sells data about the trackers themselves.”

    I have a hard time not seeing this as:

    “Ghostery was getting a shitty reputation because people did not understand that they were selling information about stooges to other stooges. Their solution was to make a dramatic shift in their business model in hopes that they could win back privacy points.”

    When it comes to digital privacy, I am not big on second chances. If Meta says they are going to opensource some portion of their crap it doesn’t win them any points with me and I won’t be trusting them with any digital data. Whatever anyone else’s opinion may be, there is plenty there to keep me from trusting Ghostery, opensource or not.

    I’m also not a fan of Wikipedia [not a primary source] but even they have this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism

    Thanks, I’ll pass on the sketchy ad blocker.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBRpW5sEvJk




  • @Bogasse

    “Phone calls home”

    In previous versions you could search your about:config on the “value” field, this is no longer possible. Searching for https:// and http:// would give you a list of numerous URLs, most of which are under Mozilla’s own domains. Some might argue that things like updates are necessary to ensure a secure browser. Others might argue that they have run very outdated browsers without problems for years, and that combined with forced updates and the Maintenance Service, the log files generated produce a not-insignificant amount of information about users.