The Purple Box

Email us for a Ghosty Sticker

adam — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:12:10 +0000

Ghosty’s got the travel bug! Over the next week, we’ll be mailing out Ghosty stickers to anyone that wants one. All we ask in exchange is that you take a picture of him doing something fun (visiting a monument, hanging out on the back of your laptop, cooking a meal, etc) and post it to our Facebook page, tweet it at us or email it to us directly.

The rules and stuff

- Sticker requests will only be accepted until Thursday of next week – 5/10/12 (sorry, its a lot of work to mail them!)

- We can’t post any pictures of Ghosty doing unsavory things. Please use good judgement!

- Please send or post the pictures with a description of where Ghosty is!

- Please be patient when waiting for us to send your stickers

How to get your stickers

Email me (Adam) your full address, formatted appropriately for your country: adam@ghostery.com

Thanks!

Ghostery for Firefox v2.7.2 update issue fixed

adam — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:36:37 +0000

Some people were having issues with a phantom update (get it?) for their Ghostery tracker lists. The list would update, but the new trackers weren’t being displayed. This has been fixed. To make the newly added elements visible, simply update your list again.

Ghostery Ranked #2 Firefox Add-on by Firefox Facebook Fans

adam — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:53:04 +0000

Firefox just posted on their blog that their Facebook fans “overwhelmingly’ recommended Ghostery as one of their favorite add-ons. Thanks for your support, Firefox Ghosterians! We’ll do our best to make sure we keep on making a product you love.

As always, we look to you to give us suggestions on improving Ghostery. If you have something you’d like to see happen with it, post it in our support forums, or email us!

Contest: The Cookie Challenge – 1,000 trackers FTW!

adam — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:58:29 +0000

Thanks to everyone that has submitted trackers to our development team here at Ghostery over the past two years, we’ve managed to amass a total of 886 trackers in our library. In fact, it’s the biggest repository of tracking scripts, pixels, LSOs, tags and other trackers on the the internet – and the internet is a pretty big place.

Reaching 1,000 trackers is something we set as a milestone for ourselves a long time ago – back when Ghostery only had a couple hundred thousand users and a library of only 238 profiles. Since then, we’ve grown to more than three million users and a database of what will soon be more than 1,000. So, we’re going to give something back.

Starting today, we are going to have a contest. We have about ten more trackers left to add in order for us to hit 1,000. The lucky user whose tracker submission number is 1,000 will get a treasure chest of Ghostery swag:

As the 1,000th person to add a tracker to our library, we’ll send you 10 Ghosty stickers, a Ghostery shirt, and a brand spankin’ new Ghosty squishy. We haven’t even gotten the squishy order in yet – that’s just the prototype in the picture!

So next time you’re looking through your cache and you see something Ghostery didn’t pick up, add it on our support forums with the word [Contest] in the subject title.

For a good example of how to add a tracker, see this post.

Thanks for helping us make great products, Ghosterians!

Privacy Geeks in Paradise: Ghostery @ SXSW

adam — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:12:37 +0000

We were flying our colors this year at South by Southwest, representing privacy in full force. In addition from meeting with some of the awesomest and most influential figures in the startup and media world, we had a lot of fun! Here’s a recap, in pictures (forgive the iPhone quality!):

We attended some amazing panels on privacy and data collection:

We charged our phones:

We philosophized:

Alas, poor 3D-printed Yorick! Andy knew him well.

We hosted a panel that featured some of the smartest people in the privacy world (!):

We spectated a Settler’s of Catan tournament:

And we messed with the RFID tracking tags in our badges

See you next year!!

Epic Battle: Ghost vs Zombie – Ghostery for Firefox v2.7.2

adam — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:59:39 +0000

Ghosty wins, of course. In the latest release of Ghostery for Firefox we fixed a bug that created “zombie compartments” for the last site Ghostery scanned for trackers. We also updated Ghostery’s options and options walkthrough pages to be a little bit easier to understand. If you used the cookie blocker alongside
certain other add-ons, there was an infrequent bug in which the two could sometimes collide, so we added a notice for this and functionality that automatically turns the blocker off. Also, a bunch of our users mentioned our hanging library update bubble as being kind of annoying, so we put a toggle for it in Ghostery’s options. Finally, in addition to other small bug fixes, we made our library update pages secure.

Another thing: we’re nearing our “1,000th tracker in the library” milestone and we’d like to tack on a quick thanks to everyone in the Ghostery community that’s submitted page elements for us to add to it.

We definitely couldn’t have found them without you!

Tracker total: 831

New features and changes:

- New options and walk through wizard pages for easier understanding and consumption
- Application and company info built into Ghostery options
- General file, defaults and variable cleanup
- Secure library update pages have been enabled
- Library update notification toggles
- Miscellaneous bug fixes

Bug fixes:

- Resolved a bug that created a zombie compartment for the last scanned site
- Ghostery shortcut has been changed to CTRL + ALT + G
- Resolved an issue with the popup auto-closing on Linux machines
- Added warning and cookie blocker disabling when a colliding addon is present
- Ghostery will now remove blocked elements from DOM
- Miscellaneous UI and bug fixes.

Block Your Brains Out – Ghostery v3.0 for Chrome is here

andy — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:03:10 +0000

Ghostery for Chrome is all grown up – v3.0 is available now, full of improvements.

First and foremost, thanks to a new and improved API from Chromium, Ghostery for Chrome now has complete detection and blocking! Goodbye forever, [experimental] tag! As of v3.0, Ghostery for Chrome catches all trackers just as it does on Firefox.

Also new to v3.0 – surrogate script support. Certain scripts are known to break pages when blocked. Ghostery will now replace these scripts with dummy versions, which should help resolve common blocking conflicts. Let us know when something doesn’t work because of Ghostery’s blocking, and we will try to fix it for all Ghostery users!

You want even more release notes? No problem -

Fixed the alert bubble display issue in Chrome 17+; addressed alert bubble security issues, plus fixed several display conflicts on various websites.
Hid alert bubble from print documents.
Tracker library updates now happen over HTTPS.
Improved findings popup’s display of long names and URLs.
Compressed images to reduce package size.
Updated the bundled tracker library.

Try out the new version, give us feedback, and if you love it like we do, please give us a 5-star rating over at the Chrome extension gallery.

Thanks for using Ghostery!

Andy K
Ghostery Product Manager
andy [at] ghostery [dot] com

Ghostery for Safari v1.3 – Send us Your Broken Pages!

adam — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:06:36 +0000

Ghostery for Safari 1.3.0 is now available. Following in the footsteps of recent Ghostery for Opera and Ghostery for Firefox updates, this latest release incorporates surrogate scripts. Surrogates are “dummy” scripts that Ghostery will use to replace commonly viewed content that can’t display without allowing tracking scripts, such as videos and widgets. For instance, in older versions of Ghostery if you blocked some companies tracking scripts, certain videos would be unviewable unless you whitelisted the script in question. Now, you can watch your video tracker-free! If you notice an element that isn’t displaying properly or isn’t functioning the way it should, please let us know and we’ll work on a replacement script for that tracker, too: support@ghostery.com.

Also, we had another important update: our library now updates over HTTPS for your (and our) peace of mind.

Download it here!

Full list of updates:

Added surrogate script support. Certain scripts are known to break pages when blocked. Ghostery will now replace these scripts with dummy versions. This should help resolve common blocking conflicts. Let us know when something doesn’t work because of Ghostery’s blocking, and we will try to fix it for all Ghostery users!

Tracker library updates now happen over HTTPS.

Fixed the alert bubble in latest versions of Safari; addressed alert bubble security issues, plus fixed several display conflicts on various websites.

Improved findings popup’s display of long names and URLs.

Hid alert bubble from print documents.

Compressed images to reduce package size.

Updated the bundled tracker library.

Enjoy!

Ghostery for Opera 0.9.5 – Introducing Surrogate Scripts!

adam — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:05:37 +0000

Ghostery for Opera 0.9.5 is live! We’ve made some significant changes, the most important of which is our inclusion of surrogate scripts.

Surrogate scripts are non-tracking scripts that we inject when Ghostery blocks content from loading, in order to make the content function appropriately. Previously, you may have been watching a video that couldn’t work without a certain element that tracks you. Your choice, while using Ghostery, was either to allow tracking and view the video or to not watch the video at all. Our new addition of surrogate scripts allows you to now watch this video free of tracking!

This is a new feature, and we’re looking to improve it to make your Ghostery browsing experience even smoother. If you notice some broken content that you think we can provide a surrogate for, please let us know on our forums so we can write a replacement for it: www.getsatisfaction.com/ghostery

Full list of updates:

Added surrogate script support. Certain scripts are known to break pages when blocked. Ghostery will now replace these scripts with dummy versions. This should help resolve common blocking conflicts. Let us know when something doesn’t work because of Ghostery’s blocking, and we will try to fix it for all Ghostery users!

Removed the blank findings popup workaround: back to properly-sized findings popups.

Bug library updates now happen over HTTPS.

Updated bundled bug library.

You’re Making the Internet a Better Place.

adam — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:00:15 +0000

Update: GoDaddy has posted a followup in their forums. This is how the internet should work all the time!

Last November, we posted a report detailing the slowest-loading 3^rd party page elements (3pes) that our volunteer panel of GhostRank members had come across. The report took on a life of its own, as often happens on the web. GoDaddy – whose site analytics product made the top ten list – contacted us. Most people are familiar with GoDaddy’s domain name services (Ghostery.com was purchased through GoDaddy, for instance), but they also offer site hosting and the site measurement tool that showed up in our lag report. We had no idea what to expect…

The response we received wound up being very positive. Their developers were genuinely concerned about the report’s findings on GoDaddy Analytics. What’s even better – they fixed it. Check out our updated latency research:

This is very exciting. You can see how empowering it really is if you break the process down:

1. GhostRank volunteers send anonymous stats back to Ghostery

2. We make a report on the data that highlights slow 3^rd party elements using the info

3. The developers of the 3pes see the report and fix the problem

4. Page load times are improved for millions of people

End result: you guys/girls just enhanced the internet for everyone who uses it!

Thank you.