Ghostery is a Firefox add-on that watches the websites that are tracking you. Also, it alerts you when you visit a website that has web bugs on it. Web bugs are hidden scripts that track your behavior and are used by the sites you visit to understand their own audience.
How does Ghostery work?
The extension embeds itself into your status bar and shows you a list of all tracking scripts in a small notification rectangle in the upper right-hand corner of each page you visit.
Tracking the visitor details is very common on modern day websites. Since the vast majority of websites are advertising supported, you’ll see the notification on every page load if you keep it enabled.
What Information is Tracked About You?
Most web site record:
- IP address
- Location
- Browser agents
- Visitor path
Take a look at our What is my IP address page to see what I am talking about.
This information is used to find out more about the visitors’ online behavior on the site and sometimes are also used for displaying advertisements based on the tracking data.
The tracking is done by special tracking services like Google Analytics, StatCounter etc., which provide tracking javascript codes to the webmasters. The code is integrated into the source code of the web pages. And when a visitor downloads a page from the server, the javascript code informs the tracking website about the details of the visitor. The info is recorded and categorized to be presented to the owner of the website.
Should You Be Worried?
As this is common practice nowadays, you probably shouldn’t. 99% of the websites you visit have tracking codes. But if you are really concerned about your privacy issues do not really want to disclose slightest details about yourself, then yes, this tracking can reveal a lot of information about you.
Conclusion
If you’re worried about your privacy online, this extension is definitely for you.