Ghostery

I’m trying a Firefox plugin called Ghostery. It shows the third party scripts that are used to track your behavior or serve ads or widgets on any site you visit.

For example, here’s what the New York Times uses:

nyt

Huffington Post:

huffpo

WordPress.com (they correctly identify the three analytics systems we use):

wp

AVC:

avc

Most tracking scripts are benign, but it’s good to keep in mind that each one of those scripts has the option to keep track of you as you interact with a web site and then send that data back to a third party.

About Toni Schneider

CEO at Automattic. Venture Partner at True Ventures. Advisor at Bandcamp, Showyou, and Singly.
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4 Responses to Ghostery

  1. Scott Rafer says:

    Thanks for passing the good word.

  2. David Cancel says:

    Toni,

    Thanks for checking out Ghostery and better yet, blogging about it! If you have any ideas send them my way.

    Cheers,
    David

  3. Pat says:

    Crazy, I actually posted this suggestion _before_ seeing your post:

    http://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/topics/what_platform_powers_this_site_whats_the_generator

    Hooray for WordPress detection!

  4. fred wilson says:

    hi toni

    i like to know as much about my readers as possible!

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