I'm interested in Disconnect. Your FAQ says you don't record personal information like IP addresses but what about statistics? Ghostery, for example, has an opt-in option to submit anonymous stats on blocked content. Do you do the same?
Okay, I have used both but didn't find Disconnect(good too) even near Ghostery or ABP(have used this too); ABP is bulky that's true..
Though I've been uneasy since Ghostery went closed source[1] but it's so easy to use and light on the browser. Disconnect is partially open source[2] too, and ABP is fully open source. I guess I might switch back to ABP if complains start for Ghostery.
Agree, ghostery is the first thing I install (Safari/Chrome -- don't use Firefox). Only issue, a couple of banking sites I use don't play well with it. On those occasions, pause, reload, do action, reenable ghostery. I only wish Pause was on a per-tab basis.
You can disable specific trackers on specific sites - e.g. unblock Google Analytics on your banking site, or Disqus on a favourite blog, rather than having to temporarily disable the whole extension browser-wide.
> You can disable specific trackers on specific sites
Either you are incorrect, or this functionality is non-obvious. Based on recent experience, I'm leaning toward the former.
When I go to edit my blocking options when a site doesn't play nice with Ghostery, I'm given options either to disable certain tracker-blocking or to disable Ghostery entirely on a given domain. There doesn't seem to be an option to stop blocking a given tracker only when its loaded from a certain site.
There is one tracker I've unblocked because it breaks functionality on one site, and I'm fairly certain I've seen its effects on a different site recently as well. It doesn't seem to have unblocked that tracker only for the one site I need it disabled to use.
The way to do it is not obvious, and varied by browser.
For Chrome and Safari, click on the Ghostery icon to bring up its popup control, then click on the 'Edit blocking options' link which will give a checkbox list of trackers to enable/disable. Click out of the pop-up to close it then, reload the page.
For Firefox, bring up to pop-up, then click on the checkbox to the right of the slider, then click on the reload link to reload the page. The slider enables/disables the tracker browser-wide, the checkbox enables/disables for the current domain.
I don't have Firefox on this computer, so I can't check on that, but you're definitely wrong about Chrome. If you click Edit blocking options and uncheck a tracker, it unblocks it globally.
I wasn't sure of this last night when I wrote the comment, but I just tried it out with Google Analytics (since it's pretty ubiquitous), and it wasn't only unblocked on that domain.
I must be misremembering the behaviour in Chrome/Safari. I guess the site-specific whitelisting must be a relatively new feature of the Firefox version that has not been ported yet.
It's non-obvious, but if you click on the check-mark instead of the slider button, it'll be allowed on one domain only. Annoyingly, it doesn't use a tooltip but tells you what the button does after you click it.
Even though I still use Ghostery, the fact that it was acquired and went closed source makes me uneasy. I don't see a revenue model here - Ghostery is still free as in beer. So I am a bit wary of the moral hazard this poses to the new owner of Ghostery.
From what I recall of their website, they have an opt-in feature whereby the add-on can send them information about what ads are appearing on what pages and the like, and they anonymise and collate the data to sell it. For instance, you could buy a service off them to the effect of "what adverts are actually appearing on my website when Joe User loads it up?"
And I believe I remember also seeing a statement to the effect of "we don't obfuscate the code in our XPI", so you could just extract the add-on as a ZIP file if you want to audit the source.
Any browser add-on could be monitoring your entire on-line activity. Why the hell does that suddenly become a problem when one's up-front about what data they collect, when they collect it, and what they do with it?
And no, they don't say "trust me". As I mentioned in my first comment, they say "if you don't trust us, unpack the add-on and check the source yourself". Which you definitely can - I just did it myself to verify, and it looks like easy reading to me.
I have found that I don't need both Ghostery and an ad blocker - simply having Ghostery block the trackers will block the vast majority of ads, and the ones that don't get blocked are inoffensive and/or actually interesting.