Our thoughts on privacy, advertising, the Internet, or anything else that tickles our fancy
Chances are, if you are reading this blog, you are already aware of the various 3rd party companies that use scripts to market their products or services to you or to find out how you use websites. As Ghostery users, you are among the privileged few Internet users that know of this quickly growing...
Here at Ghostery, we’re excited about all the great things happening with our parent company, Better Advertising. The Better Advertising platform is getting some attention, so we thought we’d distill things down for our users and explain how Ghostery fits in the big Better Advertising picture. Better Advertising has been working with leading industry associations...
I was surfing around the 37 Signals site today when I noticed something odd. It looks like 37 Signals is selling access to its audience behavioral data to Media6°. According to Media6°website they do the following: Our patent pending algorithms and methods connect a brand’s existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers...
Here’s the difference with our methodology: We track spending, not revenues. That is, we know from various records and surveys what businesses spend on e-mail advertising, and we calculate from the bottom up. We do the same for all advertising, and our numbers wind up pretty much the same for traditional media, but very...
Over the past year, there’s been a growing debate around how add-on developers can receive compensation for the work they put into their add-ons. Contributing to a healthy ecosystem « Mozilla Add-ons Blog Rafer sez:Neither @dcancel nor I believe that contributions will help Mozilla build an extension ecosystem. To be sustainable, either individually or collectively,...
Ran across this tool today on the Network Advertising Initiative site. The Opt-out tool let’s you see if Behavioral Ad Networks have an active cookie on you and let’s you opt-out of the network. Important caveat: “Opting out of a network does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean...
Finally, NoScript is still blocking Ghostery through a Ghostery-specific CSS rule. This is especially vile, since Ghostery doesn’t affect NoScript’s revenue model in the slightest – it’s just the tool I use to be informed about the analytics and advertising technologies in use from site to site. The site owners’ claim that he doesn’t...
Tonight I learned from Mark Pilgrim that the NoScript Firefox extension is arbitrarily blocking Ghostery’s notification window. This is the window that notifies you about which web bugs were found on the current page. NoScript is doing this without their user’s consent and without the option to turn off this behavior. This is the...
Protecting the Privacy Product
Collectively, the last few years have been one long coming-out party for online privacy. The FTC held well publicized privacy roundtable discussions. A highly visible online privacy bill was introduced in Congress (and several others followed behind it). Facebook and Google got caught up in a media privacy frenzy. The the Wall Street Journal released a series of articles...
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