Popular ad blocker Ghostery has released its first major update since being acquired

pulse

December 6, 2017 5:32 PM

Ghostery has 7 million monthly active users.

Ghostery, the popular ad blocker, has just released its first major update to its browser extension after being acquired n February.

Ghostery 8 is available on Firefox, Chrome, and others, and comes embedded in Cliqz, the privacy-focused browser backed by Mozilla which bought Ghostery this year.

The changes are designed to appeal to more mainstream users who care about privacy, but don't want to fiddle about enabling or disabling specific trackers on a web page. It's also meant to encourage users to see Ghostery as an all-in-one product, rather than something to be used in conjunction with a filter-list ad blocker like Adblock Plus.

The main changes are:

Blocking some ads and intrusive trackers by default
Artificial intelligence:
Easier to use:

Ghostery says it has 7 million monthly active users — so it's still a small player compared to Adblock Plus, which passed 100 million active users last year.

Tillman also told Business Insider that Ghostery doesn't sell its user data to third parties, something which landed the firm in trouble under its previous parent Evidon. Ghostery still has a data-sharing agreement with Evidon, but that will wrap up next year.

Tillman said: "Ghostery does not sell anonymised data or information to third parties. As part of our acquisition agreement, we still license our anonymised tracker data set (previously known as GhostRank data) to our previous parent company, Evidon, to use in their enterprise product suite. However, we are currently in the process of terminating that data license, effective."

pulse

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!

Unblock notifications in browser settings.

Eyewitness? Submit your stories now via social or:

Email: eyewitness@pulse.ng