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One of the wildest things I found while working on Wall Street was that ad blockers are wholesale selling data to analysts and funds. For example, I reached out

by _sword 7y ago

One of the wildest things I found while working on Wall Street was that ad blockers are wholesale selling data to analysts and funds. For example, I reached out to Ghostery asking if they had data about the data analytics tech / ad tech vendors used by industry, website, etc. to estimate market share and they responded back with a sales person telling me I could buy that data from them for five figures per year and that a number of my peers and clients were doing the same.

pythux 7y ago
Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension. Ghostery used to belong to a company named Evidon, which had this business model of collecting data to sell it in some form (the feature was called "Ghostrank"). In 2017, Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz (which builds an independent and private search engine from Germany), and since then a few things happened: (1) the extension was open-sourced, (2) Ghostrank was completely removed and (3) Ghostery is now developing paid products as a business model. For example we launched Ghostery Insights[1] and Ghostery Midnight[2] recently, both of which are subscription-based. [1]: https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ [2]: https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/ https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/
- _sword 7y ago
  Thank you for the update! I contacted Ghostery back in 2017, though I don't recall when exactly, and at that time I received a response from a salesperson. I was working on a project to try and understand market share of digital marketing software across the web at the time.
stubish 7y ago
Ghostery seems to have fallen completely out of favor for this behavior, replaced by the EFF's Privacy Badger, actual ad-blockers, and even some browser built in functionality. It would be interesting to know which other privacy plugins that sell data. Current recommendations seem to be pretty unanimously favoring plugins which do not, but it is always a moving target.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  “If it’s free, you’re the product” strikes again
- pythux 7y ago
  Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension. In addition to my answer regarding the business model of Ghostery above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809. I'd like to add a few things to address your points: (1) Ghostery did not "fall completely out of favor", as far as I can see. It is true that in _some communities_ (in particular some sub-reddits), some people tend to recommend different addons instead (often not based on any technical arguments, though), but this is not a trend that can be generalized (more people continue to recommend Ghostery as a very solid privacy protection suit). (2) EFF's Privacy Badger is not a replacement for Ghostery, for more information about why, we wrote about it in the past[1][2]. (3) Ghostery has an "actual ad-blocker" built-in, in fact, it is one of the most efficient out there as was shown in a study that we published this year[3]. The adblocker as well as benchmarks are open-source and anyone can run them locally to verify the claims. We also more recently wrote extensively about the internals of this adblocker[4]. References: [1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_users.html https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_us... [2]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-blocking-trackers.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-b... [3]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html [4]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born-equal.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born...

by _sword 7y ago

pythux 7y ago

Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension. Ghostery used to belong to a company named Evidon, which had this business model of collecting data to sell it in some form (the feature was called "Ghostrank"). In 2017, Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz (which builds an independent and private search engine from Germany), and since then a few things happened: (1) the extension was open-sourced, (2) Ghostrank was completely removed and (3) Ghostery is now developing paid products as a business model. For example we launched Ghostery Insights[1] and Ghostery Midnight[2] recently, both of which are subscription-based. [1]: https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ [2]: https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/ https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/

_sword 7y ago
Thank you for the update! I contacted Ghostery back in 2017, though I don't recall when exactly, and at that time I received a response from a salesperson. I was working on a project to try and understand market share of digital marketing software across the web at the time.

stubish 7y ago

Ghostery seems to have fallen completely out of favor for this behavior, replaced by the EFF's Privacy Badger, actual ad-blockers, and even some browser built in functionality. It would be interesting to know which other privacy plugins that sell data. Current recommendations seem to be pretty unanimously favoring plugins which do not, but it is always a moving target.

o-__-o 7y ago
“If it’s free, you’re the product” strikes again
pythux 7y ago
Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension. In addition to my answer regarding the business model of Ghostery above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809. I'd like to add a few things to address your points: (1) Ghostery did not "fall completely out of favor", as far as I can see. It is true that in _some communities_ (in particular some sub-reddits), some people tend to recommend different addons instead (often not based on any technical arguments, though), but this is not a trend that can be generalized (more people continue to recommend Ghostery as a very solid privacy protection suit). (2) EFF's Privacy Badger is not a replacement for Ghostery, for more information about why, we wrote about it in the past[1][2]. (3) Ghostery has an "actual ad-blocker" built-in, in fact, it is one of the most efficient out there as was shown in a study that we published this year[3]. The adblocker as well as benchmarks are open-source and anyone can run them locally to verify the claims. We also more recently wrote extensively about the internals of this adblocker[4]. References: [1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_users.html https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_us... [2]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-blocking-trackers.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-b... [3]: https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html [4]: https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born-equal.html https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-20/not-all-adblockers-are-born...