InformAction Forums

Hi

I'm using NoScript and have it to forbid google-analytics.com.

Today though I installed another Firefox addon, the Ghostery.

So sometimes Ghostery tells me that it blocks googl-analytics.com, while Noscript at the same time seems to be blocking it.

Is this possible?
I was expecting that Noscript would be blocking it so that Ghostery would not be able to detect it.

thanks

If NoScript doesn't have GA in its whitelist, scripts from GA can't load nor run, period.
Either Ghostery is checking the page DOM for script elements which tried to load GA scripts (and failed because of NoScript), or is detecting images (not scripts) loaded from GA.

welly wrote:Hi

I'm using NoScript and have it to forbid google-analytics.com.

Today though I installed another Firefox addon, the Ghostery.

So sometimes Ghostery tells me that it blocks googl-analytics.com, while Noscript at the same time seems to be blocking it.

Is this possible?
I was expecting that Noscript would be blocking it so that Ghostery would not be able to detect it.

thanks

I used to use Ghostery, but I removed the add-on after a trust issue. So many times I heard people say that Ghostery was tracking software pointing out that the company name is "better advertising" which does seem a bit odd. I don't know the truth about better advertising and the add-on Ghostery, but I personally felt I had to remove the add-on due to a trust issue. I think NoScript probably does all that Ghostery does and more anyway. I just enable the option to forbid Web Bugs in options and also forbid IFRAME for extra security, of course that is just my choice.

Hey guys,

Giorgio is correct. Most likely whichever extension was installed first blocks the script. If it's not there, Ghostery reports that it was in the DOM and that it's blocked. If you have it whitelisted in NoScript but not in Ghostery it will still be blocked if blocking is enabled. You can check your block log (tools>Ghostery>block log) to see which is doing it.

eradic8,

Sorry to hear you uninstalled Ghostery, but thanks for using it in the first place. Ghostery is owned by Better Advertising, but despite its name it's not an advertising company. It's a privacy regulation technology. The technology is designed to make advertisers more accountable to consumers, and to make them more transparent about the methods they use to collect data. We allow users to voluntarily opt in to our anonymous data panel (they can check that they want to enable GhostRank) if they want to help us with this. Also, GhostRank data contains absolutely no personally identifiable information and is never used for advertising.

We actually just put a blog post up about our relationship to Better Advertising, which can be found here if you want further information.

Cheers,

Adam

Thanks for all these helpful answers.

Thanks eradic I didn't know that NoScript can block web bugs actually.

Also thanks Adam for clarifying about this "better advertisement" matter.

So is Ghostery addon of any value if I am using NoScript configured to block web bugs?