We thought we seen it all, but this type of news isn’t suprising. It turns out Ghostery, one of the most popular ad-blocking applications out there, isn’t really all that good about helping their users. According to the MIT Technology Review, Ghostery is nothing more than an adware type application that actually sells the data it collects when blocking advertising to… you got it, the same people its supposed to be selling to.
The main reason that people use Ghostery is to block tracking from advertisers. Little good that does because, Evidon, the company who has made the application is actually doing the same thing: collecting data, and then selling it to advertising companies, to help them with improving their tracking mechanism. The claim from Evidon is that this data is used to see how tracking codes are working, where they are being placed and how fast they are, among other things.
While this might be true, it seems that the advertisers could use the original tracking code to find this information, not a third party “Ad Tracking Tool” to track it. Is this ethical? It this legal?
