A tracker blocking add on that shows you who is tracking you

[roadie gal]

I seem to be on a theme lately... I found a free add on that not only can block tracking sites, but can show you which company is tracking you on each web page you visit. It's called Ghostery, at www.ghostery.com. There's a little Pacman-like ghost at the top of your screen that shows you the number of tracking sites attempting to follow your surfing. You can click on that and it shows you which sites they are. (Google seems to be very interested in all that we do.) You can choose to block all, none or some of the sites. It works with Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari.

I am not associated with the company, btw.

[PamNY]

Interesting; thanks. CNET (http://download.cnet.com/Ghostery/3000-11745_4-10974194.html) gives Ghostery a good review.

[Bike Chick]

Thanks, Roadie.

[shootingstar]

So how does one boot off a virtual follower once discovered? Yea, got 1-2, I think it's a robot script or something. Doubtful it's a search engine, they don't work like that since search engines must operate differently in order to index new content frequently.

PM me if you know the technical details.

[PamNY]

So how does one boot off a virtual follower once discovered?

According to the CNET review, the Ghostery interface lets you block followers the program discovers.

[bmccasland]

Slight hi-jack. When I went to download I noticed I have two options.

Out of habit I've been using IE, but I just noticed that I also have Google Chrome on my new laptop. Any thoughts about which program I should stick with? Am not familiar at all with Google Chrome.

[PamNY]

Beth, I've used Chrome occasionally and it seems faster than Firefox.

I added Ghostery, and it surely is gratifying to see how much stuff it is blocking. Does it really matter in the great scheme of things? I don't know, but it's making me happy.

[OakLeaf]

Can you block Google's tracking scripts when you're using Chrome? They're some of the worst... (Or does Google have some non-Java non-Flash way to track Chrome usage, more likely?)

I've had no trouble with NoScript and don't see any reason to switch to Ghostery - but the more the merrier :)

[PamNY]

I don't know if you can block Google scripts while using Chrome.

Google is so intensely curious about us all; wouldn't surprise me if they have something hard to defeat. That's one reason I was slightly leery of using Chrome (but I haven't researched it at all).

[Hi Ho Silver]

I started using Firefox when it first came out. It was a great improvement over Internet Explorer. However I am now a Chrome convert. It is much faster than Firefox, less of a memory hog, and provides built in pdf viewing (So you can avoid that intrusive bloatware known as Adobe Acrobat Reader).

If you choose to use Chrome as your browser, you can/should get a couple add-ons for privacy and safety:

NotScript - allows you to control (via a whitelist or blacklist) which sites can run scripts (It is Chrome's version of Firefox's NoScript)

Vanilla - allows you more control (via a whitelist) over which sites get to keep cookies on your computer

[OakLeaf]

I'd also highly recommend an app like Flush to delete your Flash cookies, aka LSO (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Local_Shared_Object)s (or find out where they are on your hard drive and delete them separately). They're stored separately from browser cookies.

I just deleted one from akamai, which is blacklisted as black as can be on my computer. I don't know how they were able to set that (definitely some more investigation in my future...), but if I hadn't gone specifically to delete it, I'd never have known it was there.


I like NoScript and Firefox because they allow you to authorize a site to set session cookies, and allow scripts on an ad hoc basis, rather than relying solely on a blanket whitelist or blacklist the way some browsers and extensions do. F'rinstance, it's getting more and more common for retail sites to require Google Analytics :eek:. If I really want to buy something from one of those sites, I can quit my browser to delete my browsing and download history (or do that manually if you haven't got your browser set to delete all that), login to the site I'm interested in and temporarily allow Google Analytics (or whatever other spyware they require), then revoke temporary permissions and start a new browser session, all from the main window.

[Hi Ho Silver]

OakLeaf - The Chrome add-ons I mentioned basically allow you to do the same things you mentioned in Firefox. NotScript allows you to temporarily allow a site (ie, one not in your whitelist) to run a script. Vanilla, if set up correctly with Chrome, will cause Chrome to delete all cookies (ie, make them per session) from sites not in its whitelist when the browser is closed.