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Find out how web sites are watching you with Ghostery
Ghostery is a plugin for Firefox that alerts you when you visit a web site using "web bugs," which are basically scripts that track your information for one reason or another. Ghostery currently tracks more than 100 different types of web bugs, and alerts you if a web page is using scripts from sites like Sitemeter, Amazon, or PollDaddy by displaying a purple window with a list of bugs on top of the web page you're visiting.The alert bubble disappears after about 15 seconds. Or if you'd rather not see the pop up every time you visit a new web site, you can right click on the Ghostery icon in the Firefox status bar and suspend the service until you want to use it again.
Not every item that's classified as a "web bug" is necessarily malicious. In fact, most are simply the tools that web publishers use to place advertising on their site, or enable other features like third party commenting system Disqus. But normally many of these scripts are hidden. And if you want to know what kind of scripts on any web page are tracking you, Ghostery can help you find out.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentssalrix3Jan 28th 2009 8:10AM
this is nice, but if i can't tell what those web bugs are doing then it really doesn't help. some of them are obvious by their name, but others are not. is there a directory of web bugs anywhere?
David CancelJan 28th 2009 9:50AM
Hi,
Thanks for writing about Ghostery, I'm the author. Love your blog, really psyched.
Salrix3-You bring up a good point. On our roadmap is adding a wiki page for each webbug where you can find out more info about the webbug. We'll be releasing that in the coming weeks. Thank your for checking us out.
Cheers,
David
John DoeFeb 5th 2009 1:35PM
I am watching all of you and you don't know who I am and you can't get rid of me.
The Skull
DaveApr 3rd 2009 4:01PM
A lot of these "web bugs" are actually useful, because site owners use the data to make their websites more user friendly--if you can see what visitors actually want when they view your site, you can make those things more accessible or prominent.
I think this is a great little application though! I don't feel like clicking on every web page to see the tracking scripts on it, but it would definitely be interesting to know about them.