Ghostery "Midnight" - Adblocker + VPN

vyas

This looks interesting- though the $ 14/month pricepoint could be steep for many

https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/ghosteyr-midnight/

Quote from the article (this is also the crux of the Techcrunch article, to save you the trouble of clicking and veering off of LES)

"Midnight will block ads and data trackers in email clients like Microsoft Outlook, entertainment services like Spotify and any other desktop app — including web browsers that don’t support the Ghostery extension. You’ll also be able to see which apps are trying to track you and customize which apps get blocked or whitelisted.

In addition, Midnight includes a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt and anonymize your online activity. Tillman said that many Ghostery users already use a VPN, but it made sense to build one for Midnight because “we want our entire ecosystem to be integrated.”

I've used the ghostery add on for browsers in the past- runs iffy on Safari but okay on Firefox. Thinking of giving it a try. Any of you have thoughts on Ghostery/ have you used it?

Janevski

pihole.

poisson

Adguard DNS. Free.

WSS

Butts.

tgl

I've been using just Ghostery for 1 year now on Chrome and I did not have any issues, overloading your browser is not a good idea, I did that in the past when I had Ghostery + AdBlock and I was not understanding why my CPU went to 100% at many times, then I switched to uBlock I also had a lot of issues there many pages saying I'm using an ad blocker

vyas

Thanks for the feedback that included holes, butts and ghostery only

havoc

Seems rather expensive.

ublock + pihole + noscript for me

joepie91

Ghostery is operated by a marketing company. Wouldn't recommend using it. It doesn't really do much more than uBlock Origin with a tracking company list would do either. Plus a Pi-Hole for network-wide blocking (though it will block slightly less, as it can only block network stuff).

If you're actually looking for an effective tracking blocker, use Privacy Badger instead. Operated by the EFF, not some sketchy marketing company, and instead of 'dumb' blacklist-based blocking, it uses heuristics to detect things that look like trackers automatically, even obscure ones.

flips

How good/bad are Firefox's builtin privacy protection stuff?

Nyr

Ridiculous as with nearly all of the "privacy as a service" stuff.

As soon as I read it, the name Cliqz ringed a bell. They are the ones who did this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox

And now they want to sell you privacy for $14/month.

vyas

Conclusion so far: Money saved! (better yet, money not wasted over something sub-optimal?)

poisson

@joepie91 said:
Ghostery is operated by a marketing company. Wouldn't recommend using it. It doesn't really do much more than uBlock Origin with a tracking company list would do either. Plus a Pi-Hole for network-wide blocking (though it will block slightly less, as it can only block network stuff).

If you're actually looking for an effective tracking blocker, use Privacy Badger instead. Operated by the EFF, not some sketchy marketing company, and instead of 'dumb' blacklist-based blocking, it uses heuristics to detect things that look like trackers automatically, even obscure ones.

I choose to use Chromium based Iridium browser which itself is quite privacy oriented and tack on Privacy Badger + free AdGuard DNS. If paranoid, I will turn on my Windscribe VPN with ROBERT activated.

level6

I second pi-hole.net and also use Windscribe at times. WIndscribe's Linux client works great.