Top all-time · #4253
Ghostery
Company blog · whotracks.me/blogsecuritydata
Ghostery is the company blog at whotracks.me, writing about security and data. Since 2017, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Adblockers Performance Study”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link whotracks.me for its measurements of online trackers: tracker profiles, tracking data for popular sites, and an adblocker performance study. Commenters cite its posts as data sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Adblockers Performance Study4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-02-15
- WhoTracks.Me4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-05
- Show HN: Whotracks.me - Tracking the Trackers3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-08-27
- Post GDPR:A look at Tracking landscape, competition and compliance2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-09-04
- The Top 1000 Most Prevalent Trackers on the Web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-12
What Hacker News says?
Here are some measurements from the Ghostery team which show that the impact of the non-declarative API can be extremely minimal, and maybe even negative if you consider the increased performance from the reduced ad load. https://whotracks.me/blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
Comment linking /blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
on “Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection”Submitted Adblockers Performance Study as a story · 212 points
HN discussionThis blog post is highly misleading. For example, they start off with several paragraphs about security/privacy implications, but this change doesn't have any security/privacy implications. That's because they have explicitly stated that they will not deprecate the observational webRequest API, which has exactly the same privacy considerations as the content blocking API. However because the observational API provid…
Comment linking /blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
on “Adblocking: How about Nah?”Submitted Show HN: Whotracks.me - Tracking the Trackers as a story · 12 points
HN discussionHere are some examples: https://whotracks.me/blog/block-third-party-cookies.html
Comment linking /blog/block-third-party-cookies.html
on “Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking”Submitted Google redirects European searchers to Google.com as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Does the Cliqz browser still disallow plugins, such as ad blockers? Hey, I work on Cliqz' adblocker (open-source here: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker ). Cliqz browser comes built-in with adblocking, anti-tracking, anti-phishing and private search built-in so that users are protected by default . You can also install another one if you prefer since all Firefox extension are also available from Cliqz! But th…
Comment linking /blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
on “The world needs more search engines”Submitted 9461 out of 10000 sites have Google Fonts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThat Google said it was about privacy? There's some quotes in this article: https://whotracks.me/blog/manifest_v3_privacy.html Or that extensions can still inject javascript, observe and log requests, exfiltrate data? I mean the api docs will tell you that. Extensions can do all that because they couldn't do a whole lot without those capabilities...normally used for legit purposes, but the apis can't really glean in…
Comment linking /blog/manifest_v3_privacy.html
on “Chrome users beware: Manifest v3 is deceitful and threatening”Submitted Post GDPR:A look at Tracking landscape, competition and compliance as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGA is present on 46% of web traffic [1] or 65% of top web pages [2], so you could be justified to claim the majority... [1]: https://whotracks.me/trackers/google_analytics.html [2]: http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site...
Comment linking /trackers/google_analytics.html
on “Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS”Submitted WhoTracks.Me as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz) Extending on that, let me elaborate why we cannot open the data, not even a subset of it. We had the discussion in the past, but for two reasons it is not an option. Although it is anonymous data - currently we are not aware of any de-anonymization attacks - it is still data that came from real persons. We have a responsibility: once the data is out, we have to guarantee that no-one wil…
Comment linking /
on “Building a Search Engine from Scratch”Submitted Generating Ad-Blocker filters from whotracks.me data as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is our anti-tracking tech we include in the Cliqz browser and also in the Ghostery Extension. We have another post lined up in the series on this (in a couple of weeks), but it's also been described in our blog posts[1] and our 2016 paper[2]. [1]: https://whotracks.me/blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_us... [2]: https://static.cliqz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Cliqz-St...
Comment linking /blog/how_cliqz_antitracking_protects_users.html
on “Building a Search Engine from Scratch”Submitted The Top 1000 Most Prevalent Trackers on the Web as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> No references in any of your published source code, and your search engine isn't free software: You looked at the wrong tab, check in "Code" to find "code" related to Anolysis: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acliqz-oss+anolysis&type=Co... > Cliqz has done unsavory things in the past (like the Firefox fiasco a few years back, for example, which I can't fault Cliqz entirely for: Mozilla is just as guilty). Not sur…
Comment linking /blog/private_analytics.html
on “Building a Search Engine from Scratch”Submitted Trackers who steal: More than 100 websites still affected from MageCart as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFor measuring presence of trackers on popular websites, I recommend: https://whotracks.me/ Disclaimer: This is a project from the company I work for. (Cliqz)
Comment linking /
on “How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com”Submitted Learn about tracking technologies, market structure and data-sharing on the web as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGreat point! We wrote about how we're doing it on whotracks.me a while ago, if anyone is wondering how that could work: https://whotracks.me/blog/private_analytics.html
Comment linking /blog/private_analytics.html
on “The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)”Submitted Third-party cookies - the guests who won't leave as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhile these sources don't answer your question directly, they do measure some impact of GDPR: > The tracking landscape post GDPR, adverse effects on competition and a market for compliance technologies https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html By September, stats showed that Google and Facebook managed to stay relatively the same in the EU, while all the other ad companies lost reach. > The Short-Run Effects…
Comment linking /blog/gdpr-what-happened.html
on “GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe”Submitted What will happen to the data collected by 600 () trackers? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I'm sure Google and FB lawyers are super happy about GDPR: EU is helping them entrench their monopolies. We saw some information about this rather soon after GDPR went into effect.[0] I wonder if there's some more recent data like this. [0] https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html
Comment linking /blog/gdpr-what-happened.html
on “GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe”Hi, I work on the Ghostery extension. In addition to my answer regarding the business model of Ghostery above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897809 . I'd like to add a few things to address your points: (1) Ghostery did not "fall completely out of favor", as far as I can see. It is true that in _some communities_ (in particular some sub-reddits), some people tend to recommend different addons instead (often…
Comment linking /blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
on “Model beats Wall Street analysts in forecasting business financials”Hi, I work at Cliqz on our Anti-tracking system, and the WhoTracks.Me data that powers these stats on the search page. These stats are updated monthly, and based on millions of loads of each site. The WhoTracks.Me page for wikipedia.org ( https://whotracks.me/websites/wikipedia.org.html ) shows that the Google Fonts and Google Static trackers occur very infrequently (<2% of pages), so may be on some part of the site…
Comment linking /trackers/wikimedia.org.html
on “A New Search Engine”> 1) Trackers Stats. This feature is powered by another project we run, where we measure the tracking landscape in the web (most popular domains): https://whotracks.me . Details on how that works can be found in our paper [0]. Also - we are flirting with the idea of providing a mode where the ranking is informed by the trackers in the destination site. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether you'd like smth like…
Comment linking /
on “A New Search Engine”Maybe of interest: https://www.whotracks.me/ - A growing list of profiles on trackers and tracking landscape on popular domains.
Comment linking /
on “How PayPal Shares Your Data”> Why the ruckus then? Because some assume that is data is sent, privacy is compromised, period. They do not know how to do it, and they assume it's impossible. Instead of checking the claims for themselves (code is public, data can be inspected, documentation, etc.) they prefer to stick to their belief system, which is more comfortable and does not imply hard work. If my eyes rolled any harder I'd likely pull a mus…
Comment linking /blog/adblockers_performance_study.html
on “Cliqz is shutting down”
