PolkaPatrol

Thanks for the love!

Ghostery is supported by Ghostrank, our 100% opt-in feature that collects information about the trackers you see and the sites on which you see them. Our parent company, Evidon, packages that information and sells it back to sites who use it for privacy, performance, and security audits; and also ad tech companies who use it for competitive intelligence about each other.

That information is totally anonymous - it's all intelligence about the tracking industry, none about our users. And Ghostery works exactly the same whether you choose to share that with us or not.

We hope you'll opt-in, but we're committed to delivering a good product for user transparency whether you choose to or not.

That's pretty much it, yeah. Except that when you block with Ghostery, you're disabling all communication with data collection companies (as opposed to opt-out, which sends a request for them not to track you). It's a subtle difference, but we think it's an important distinction.

From our perspective, there's no real conflict. We collect information about those companies and help them audit themselves and each other, but we do not help them by giving them any user information at all.

We like the model we've created - selling data about ad tech companies to ad tech companies to fund a tool that helps users keep close watch on ad tech companies. There's no incentive for us to somehow modify Ghostery to give those companies an advantage - that would undermine the quality of data they count on us to provide.

While not released under an open source license (yet), the code is totally unobfuscated. You can unpack any of our extensions and see exactly how we work. If you speak JS, give it a go.

EDIT: Heh, yeah, what Felix said.

It's a fair point, for sure. And we're not suggesting that availability of the code is a substitue for an actual open source license.

But neither our code architecture nor our current license keeps you from digging around in the code and keeping us accountable for what we claim, so please do that if it's a worry.

We're not threatened by potential forks... it's actually the opposite. Hopefully we'll be able to get a collaborative, open-source effort around Ghostery in the near future so we can can take advantage of the time and dedication from like-minded folks out there.