After reading some mixed reviews and after using this extension for a while myself, I decided to do some digging around âunder the hoodâ even though Iâve never used Ghosteryâs GhostRank âfeature,â which shares your browsing history with the company. I concluded that this add-on is a total scam, and doesnât block tracking by Facebook, Google, and othersâeven when its notifications suggest otherwise.
For example, Ghostery version 2.9.6 is hard-coded to re-inject Facebook tracking scripts even when it doesnât show related Facebook script content. You can see this for yourself in lines 101-119 after opening a file called ghostery.js in the subdirectory named /extensions/firefox@ghostery.com/chrome/content/ of your Firefox profile folder.
This is in addition to the various âsurrogate scriptsâ that Ghostery claims arenât related to tracking (but *would* easily still track you if an ad-tracking company had any sense, since they explicitly connect you to 3rd-party sites). You can see this list for yourself in the /extensions/firefox@ghostery.com/chrome/content/ghostery-surrogates.json file (open with text editor) of your Firefox profile folder.
Ghostery also gives your info to Google by explicitly white-listing Googleâs gstatic.com domain, which you can also verify in a text editor with lines 159 and 160 of the ghostery-content-policy.js file found in the extensions/firefox@ghostery.com/components/ subdirectory of your Firefox profile folder.
Ghosteryâs use of the OpenSans-Bold font installed with the extension in your Firefox profile folderâs /extensions/firefox@ghostery.com/resource/font subdirectory can be used to fingerprint browsers, further decreasing user privacy. For more on these privacy compromises, see EFFâs Pantopiclick project.
You can see a list of the many sites where Ghostery doesnât actually block scripts for âcompatibilityâ reasons (i.e. corporate partners paid them off) by opening the file called ghostery-compatibility.json from your Firefox profileâs extensions/firefox@ghostery.com/chrome/content/ subdirectory.
This extension deceives users into thinking that theyâre not being tracked by ad companies when GhostRank is disabled. My own experience with Ghostery, however, suggests that this is not the case. Barring a detailed and thorough explanation of the above from the developer, I wouldnât touch this extension with a ten-foot pole.