Ghostery appears on Hacker News quiet often and sometimes people here think that we should do things differently. Well, here we are, open for change if you join us -- you, a senior level developer that will most definitely affect the product direction, future of what Ghostery is, and affect the millions of users that use Ghostery every single day.
Full job description is here: https://purplebox.ghostery.com/post/1016024115 To apply, email us your CV or resume to [email protected] or follow the links in the blog post.
We are in New York City and hope that the candidate is local, though relocation assistance is offered. International candidates are welcome as well. Feel free to ask any questions you may have.
We are most definitely not influenced by third parties, if anything, companies now contact us directly to provide their registration information for monitoring by Ghostery. Additionally, we keep the database changes public here: https://www.ghostery.com/en/database/changelog
Well, you are already using one of the best tools to keep your online footprint to a minimum, and it plainly asks you if you want to contribute data. This is an option and its off by default.
No one is intentionally obscuring anything. If you have a better idea of how to explain what we do, by all means, please tell me and I shall make it happen.
What happens is straight forward tho. Ghostery collects tracker data as you browse and sends it to us if you've allowed us to collect the data by enabling Ghostrank.
Thanks for asking relevant questions and I agree about the dissonance. Our teams job is to make sure they are minimized and we're working on fixing those things. Something to keep in mind tho is that our team is very small (4 people), so it takes time to get stuff done.
As I said, we are adjusting to fit what our users think rather than what we preached. The site is 2 month old, and it reflects the new updated stance, and as I said earlier, the extensions will also be updated with pre-configured settings.
I'm not sure what you mean by that question? Ghostery is a separate team inside Evidon with full control over what we do. I'm one of the people managing the product and my customers are users of Ghostery. As such, my primary goal isn't improved blocking, its education - to let users know that they are being tracked, to provide relevant info on who are the trackers and where to find out more about them, and finally, provide control in the form of blocking.
Your argument would be much better placed in our support forum. There, we do see much more opinions that are not the same, and the conclusions we draw are based on a bunch of inputs, but our support forum is probably the #1 place for issues we look at. Blocking pre-selections are currently slotted for mid-2014 because its actually a low priority item according to the votes we see.
If you feel strongly that your opinion is important and should be prioritized, please create relevant topic here: https://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/ and gather support to change it so we address it quicker.
Ghostery does not call itself a tracker-blocker, our users do. This is an obvious oversight for most users, and its somethign that we will address, but at this time, Ghostery is designed to reveal the invisible web and give user the control over it, not make decisions for the users...
As far as the feature, at the implementation time, we've queried a set of users that agreed that when new trackers are added, there is no need to let the user know until s/he encounters it for the first time and reviews it. Obviously, this is another setting we will be moving away from advanced and into wizard so the users may review and select this option at install time.
This is somewhat wrong: Ghostery, ever since version 1, had Ghostrank feature in it. It has always been an opt-in deal, the users who trust us may turn it on so provide us with data. For the first 4 years the data sat without any use until recently where Evidon figured out how to turn it into money. Even so, the data Evidon sells has nothing about any user, merely tracker data. Here are some samples of whats actually delivered to clients: http://www.knowyourelements.com/ and http://www.evidon.com/evidon-trackermap/tagchains-static.htm....
As I said, we do not trick the users into anything, and are as transparent about where the data goes as possible, if you have suggestions how to increase this then please let us know. We currently cover this question in every listing Ghostery has, all options pages, web site, FAQ, and many posts on our blog.
As far as defaults: originally, Ghostery was a detection software designed to "reveal the invisible web", but has added blocking since. Our official stance is that we do not make decisions for the user, but we do run every user through an install wizard that explains whats up. Disconnects stance here is a different, they do offer default blocking, tho they also have their own "whiteliest" built into it without telling the users about it. We are going to add some easy configuration in the near future that will pre-block stuff, but this is still in the works.
Finally, Ghostery source is available for review for "sneakiness" since every extension is pure javascript. We host it here if you're interested: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/ and you can just unzip any other extension to extract source.
Heh, Ghostery is not paid to whitelist anyone, I would know since I run the database for Ghostery.
As to your question: NoScript does a different thing -- it concentrates on limiting known security issues by disabling Javscript. Tracking is accomplished in a variety of ways, and only some of them are Javascript based. Ghostery looks for all of these and lets users know who is tracking them on any given web page.
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Ghostery appears on Hacker News quiet often and sometimes people here think that we should do things differently. Well, here we are, open for change if you join us -- you, a senior level developer that will most definitely affect the product direction, future of what Ghostery is, and affect the millions of users that use Ghostery every single day. Full job description is here: https://purplebox.ghostery.com/post/1016024115 To apply, email us your CV or resume to [email protected] or follow the links in the blog post.
We are in New York City and hope that the candidate is local, though relocation assistance is offered. International candidates are welcome as well. Feel free to ask any questions you may have.