diff --git a/Ghostery.md b/Ghostery.md index 7d1dad9..95b02eb 100644 --- a/Ghostery.md +++ b/Ghostery.md @@ -74,13 +74,13 @@ Of course it depends on how you setup uBlock Origin, the more you block the bett On top of the part actively protecting privacy like anti-tracking and content blocking, there are other features to clear cookies from tracker domains to keep a "clean slate", etc. (A bit like what [Safari](https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/) and [Firefox](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Privacy/Redirect_tracking_protection) have implemented). For example, Ghostery clears **cookies from tracking domains that you did not visit as first parties** after an hour or so, hardening the protection further. [^1] ### "Ghostery does not have much customization or fine-grained controls (dynamic filtering, medium mode, element picker etc.)." -This is an interesting point and I think it is worst pointing out that Ghostery is aiming at providing the best privacy protection out of the box. This also means that IMO there is less of a need for dynamic filtering and medium mode, which are (I think), mostly needed because of the limitations of content blocking (e.g. not all requests can be blocked otherwise websites are broken, so there needs to be a way to fine-tune the behavior manually). +This is an interesting point and I think it is worst pointing out that Ghostery is aiming at providing the best privacy protection out-of-the-box. This also means that IMO there is less of a need for dynamic filtering and medium mode, which are (I think), mostly needed because of the limitations of content blocking (e.g. not all requests can be blocked otherwise websites are broken, so there needs to be a way to fine-tune the behavior manually). On the other hand, in Ghostery we introduced (alongside the traditional content blocker or adblocker), an [anti-tracking feature](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-19/blocking-tracking-without-blocking-trackers.html) which is not based on blocklists, and is able to remove unsafe datapoints (e.g. fingerprints, third-party cookies, unique identifiers, etc.) from requests without having to block them, drastically reducing breakage. It's great to offer customization options, but this does not automatically translate into better privacy (and there are other ways to increase the privacy protection and reduce breakage). In the end these features are targeted at power users, but I would argue that they are not necessarily increasing the privacy offered by the extension (e.g., Ghostery anti-tracking does not require any customization but still allows to remove unsafe data points from all requests with lower breakage rate than content blockers). -To summarize, I agree that uBlock Origin gives more customization options, but I don't think this is necessarily the most relevant metric to compare extensions. I would rather focus on the privacy protection offered (especially out of the box, since most users will likely not change the settings). [^4] +To summarize, I agree that uBlock Origin gives more customization options, but I don't think this is necessarily the most relevant metric to compare extensions. I would rather focus on the privacy protection offered (especially out-of-the-box, since most users will likely not change the settings). [^4] Be sure to [check out](https://github.com/yokoffing/Better-Fox/wiki/Ghostery#my-recommended-build) the Betterfox recommended setup for Ghostery! @@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ My point is not that uBlock Origin is doing a bad job; in fact, I think that thi ### Do I still need Privacy Badger? Privacy Badger is, to the best of my knowledge, the only other popular extension which uses some kind of heuristics to block tracking. There are some fundamental differences in how Privacy Badger and Ghostery work, though. -For example, Privacy Badger will try to learn over time which domains are "tracking" you then block these in the future, based on locally analyzed information. In contrast, Ghostery's anti-tracking is working out of the box and privacy protection is derived from a global knowledge of trackers on the Web. +For example, Privacy Badger will try to learn over time which domains are "tracking" you then block these in the future, based on locally analyzed information. In contrast, Ghostery's anti-tracking is working out-of-the-box and privacy protection is derived from a global knowledge of trackers on the Web. Another big difference is that Privacy Badger will block requests, but Ghostery's anti-tracking is able to drop unsafe data-points from requests without having to block them completely (e.g. fingerprints, tracking cookies, unique ids, etc.); this in turn leads to much lower breakage of websites. To be clear, Ghostery also employs a traditional content blocker, but the privacy of our users does not depend on us blocking all requests (which is impossible by the way, unless you want to break lots of websites). So the anti-tracking will sanitize any request which was not already blocked, to ensure privacy is not at risk.