I picked the news that Better Advertising Acquires Ghostery via the No DPI forum. Ghostery is a very popular plugin that identifies tracking scripts on webpages, and offers the option of blocking said scripts. I’m not sure how significant this will prove to be, but I note from the Better Advertising web page that
We created Better Advertising because we knew there had to be a better way to conduct online behavioral advertising. Our goal is simple: provide solutions that help deliver the best ads and provide the best privacy, bringing transparency and trust to the online advertising ecosystem.
We do this by helping advertisers, advertising agencies, advertising networks, publishers, consumers, and industry associations to be accountable to each other and to make it clear, simple, and easy to understand how online behavioral advertising is occurring. We think improving the way data is collected, used and disclosed – and doing so in a transparent manner – will raise the quality of the entire online advertising industry. Most importantly, Better Advertising understands the importance of privacy to consumers.
Better Advertising’s technology helps online advertisers, agencies and networks continue to self-regulate. Working closely with our design partners, Better Advertising is at the vanguard of online advertising. The Better Advertising platform will enable advertisers to maximize their use of innovative digital strategies, including behavioral targeting, while meeting anticipated demand for enhanced transparency and consumer privacy.
I’m not sure that the acquisition of Ghostery by this lot is a good thing, and it’s probably worth keeping an eye on the situation. The NoDPI forum also points out a bug in the current Ghostery plugin which causes Firefox to take ages to close down. This is something I’ve noticed lately, but not pinned down.
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16th April 2010 at 4:21 am
Hello Grumpymob,
Thanks for the feature on Ghostery. I’m the community manager at Ghostery. Your concerns were shared by quite a few of our community members after our initial acquisition of Ghostery. We’ve made a few updates to the Better Advertising Website (http://www.betteradvertising.com/about_us.html) to better clarify what Better Advertising does, and does not do.
More importantly, the Ghostery team has been hard at work in keeping the evolution of Ghostery as a consumer tool ahead of the game. We’ve fixed the bug you noted as of last Feb, and are presently in the process of rolling out Ghostery for Google Chrome as well as IE in the next three weeks. The Firefox version is also getting an upgrade that includes detecting iFrames, Silverlight and Flash. Please feel free to contact me directly at rose@ghostery.com with any questions you may have.
Looking forward to your feedback on the new iterations of Ghostery upon our latest releases.
Rose.
Rose@ghostery.com
twitter.com/ghostery