InformAction Forums

To the privacy concerned,

You might may have heard about ghostery - a nice and earlier valuable extension for Fx and Flock browser to make third party tracking bugs transparent. Now it has been sold to the very segment it was meant to make transparent, one could say nice extension lost to the "enemy": where a tracker hunter becomes a top notch tracker...

Why did we buy Ghostery?
Better Advertising will use data shared voluntarily by Ghostery users to understand the compliance and non-compliance of companies with the industry’s self regulatory principles. With Ghostery, Better Advertising can provide companies and industry associations with a complete view of OBA usage. This makes complying easier for companies, and furthers our mission of providing a more transparent, trusted environment for consumers and advertisers.

A token on the wall, ghostery add-on sold to one of the firms it was developed-out- against:
http://blog.betteradvertising.com/2010/ ... -ghostery/
So probably a very interesting Firefox add-on will be run into the ground....It already shows an adverse reaction in 3.5.7

Have we again lost some ground in the battle because of the change of attitude with younger generations that are less and less privacy concerned and are fully unaware of the risks?
I hope the developer of NS and the forum users thereof will stay true to their mission always and defend this invaluable extension against every threat from outside,

luntrus

As our beloved mod Tom can tell you, I discovered this many months ago and posted a discussion of it in our private forum. It does not surprise or shock me one bit and I have been saying that he is using the addon as a honeypot for getting tracking information and then reselling that. I also have a post on getsatisfaction.com regarding the addon as well and much of the public have joined in the discussion to express all possible perspectives, you are welcome to check that out. I am glad that YOU took the initiative to expose this as I didn't have the time or the desire to be the whistleblower on this issue, because I didn't have the time or energy to deal with a possible backlash.

Hi GµårÐïåñ,

You do not have to be afraid of that and neither do I, because this was all over the Internet on various security sites in the Netherlands and U.K. alike. So when it has been published by the Register, we don't have to be afraid to be accused of whistleblowing and experience the back-lash of it. Again this is just symptomatic for an overall development we see being carried out just before our eyes, the positioning of geo-location and HTML-5 for better profiling of the browser user. On the one hand it has to do with commercialized user-tracking - on the other hand with monopoly positioning (new versus settled interests at the cost of the common user). With the browser user agent info combined with this and other data it is quite possible and easy to identify a unique user and with the aid of Super Cookies one could go on ad-tracking and profiling the browser-user unhindered by ad- and scriptblocking, but again then your analytic data have to be there, perfect and ready, and that is what can be performed with this method,

luntrus

At that time, there was no openly noted announcement of it by anyone and I was debating if I should and decided to write it up and have Tom proof it and then post it on various sites. However, I decided against it because of my health and time constraints and left it to die. Since then many have talked about it and yes there is no chance of a backlash for us, I was simply stating it in retrospect to our own discussions much prior to the exposure.