Tag: ghostery

Advert Blockers

Adverts are useful in that they fund services that we wouldn’t necessarily want to pay directly for but still benefit from.

e.g. Freeview TV, commercial radio, Channel 4 TV, free newspapers etc.

A typical newspaper, partially funded by advertising, would need to increase its cover price by 100% – 200% if advertising was stopped.

But, there are huge amounts of advertising that most of us wish didn’t exist.

In print, you can ignore the ads, on TV you can go make a cup of tea during the ad breaks or record the programmes and fast forward through the ads etc.

However, in some situations adverts are intrusive and cannot be so easily ignored.

There are many websites with adverts that don’t get in the way – so that’s fine, but there increasing numbers of websites where the ads are flashing, moving, popping up in the middle of the screen and sometimes so bad we can’t see the actual content we went to the page for in the first place.

Advert Blockers can make your life easier by blocking most of these adverts.

The most popular browsers have some features for blocking intrusive ads.

e.g. Google Chrome (settings – content settings) blocks pop-ups and ads from sites classified as intrusive.

Opera has a built-in ad-blocker.

Blocking adverts also blocks many tracking cookies, which protects your privacy as well.

The Most Popular Ad Blockers

Ghostery

Ghostery has been around for years and is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer plus Android and iOS.

Firefox Focus

You can install any one of the many ad-blocking extensions on the desktop version of Firefox, but Mozilla has created a dedicated mobile browser for Android and iOS called Focus.

This is focused on privacy which means that, by default, it works like the private browsing mode on other browsers.

AdBlock

AdBlock is free, but it does ask for a donation on installation.

It blocks all ads on the web, including on Facebook, YouTube and other social sites.

You can also allow what AdBlock calls Acceptable Ads – similar to those ‘non-intrusive’ ads in AdBlock Plus.

There are lots of Ad Blockers on the market. See which one best suits your needs.

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3 Tools That Block Online Tracking

A lot of our activities online are tracked by a variety of organisations. The various tools described below operate in different ways and none can guarantee to eliminate 100% of trackers so it’s trying them to see if they suit what you want.

Sometimes this is just so they can display relevant adverts or to offer location specific answers (e.g. local restaurants), sometimes to learn about their customers and sometimes for less acceptable reasons. However, if should be our choice how much is tracked – not the software makers and users.

 

Ghostery   https://www.ghostery.com/products/ 

This has a large database of tracking entities i.e. software that will track you. You install the browser add-on then it can detect these entities and block them as you browse.

On each website, Ghostery displays a list of trackers from that site in the upper right corner of the screen.. You can then go to the settings page and block individual trackers or block all trackers.

The browser add-on is available for the most browsers.

Disconnect https://disconnect.me/

The browser add-on blocks trackers as it finds them, but allows requests that it considers to be necessary for loading content.

Disconnect detects trackers based on the number of requests they’ve made for your information, and displays them in one of four categories: advertising, analytics, social and content. You can choose to block or allow each tracker.

Privacy Badger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

This tool is belongs to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and uses an algorithm to “learn” which social or ad networks are tracking you over time.

It initially allows third-party trackers until it detects patterns in third-party requests. Then it will start automatically blocking what it considers “non-consensual invasions of people’s privacy”. This approach may mean the tool identifies new trackers more quickly than its competition but it takes longer to be effective.

Privacy Badger is available for Google Chrome and Firefox.

You can see these tools operate in a different manner, all attempting to block online tracing without stopping anything you find useful.

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