I just learned about Ghostery.
Don’t know if you all had heard of it already, but since Chris has posted some cool technical things here before I thought I’d go ahead.
Besides, it’s been a few weeks since the last post.
OK. Ghostery:
Ghostery sees the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
After showing you who’s tracking you, Ghostery also gives you a chance to learn more about each company it identifies. How they describe themselves, a link to their privacy policies, and a sampling of pages where we’ve found them are just a click away.
Ghostery allows you to block scripts from companies that you don’t trust, delete local shared objects, and even block images and iframes. Ghostery puts your web privacy back in your hands.
I’ve been using it for about a week. I like it a lot.
This looks interesting and I”ll have to load it up at home and play around with it.
Every now and then I’ll have a need to fire up Fiddler – a program that sits between your browser and the internet so you can see all traffic out and in, as detailed as you want – and I’d see traffic to all sorts of places. Especially interesting to watch when I wasn’t actively doing anything.
I downloaded it and find it interesting to see what is active (or trying to be active now, since I blocked everything in the Ghostery list. Figured I didn’t know what they all were, but if they made it to the watch list, I didn’t need them. So far clocking the list has had no effect on my browsing, except that it is nice when the box pops up telling me what is trying to work and isn’t now.