[iSnow]

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.

[EvilTerran]

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.

[Evbn]

Awesome, so their monetization strategy is to undermine the whole product and say "trust me"

[fixanoid]

Well, it would be that if Ghostery didn't offer you choice. Also, the data collected is about trackers and not the user.

Note: Ghostery dev here.

[EvilTerran]

Jesus H Christ, knee-jerk harder why don't you.

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.