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corumeach . October 21, 2014 10:03

Disabled trackers block website functionality

Not a problem of Ghostery, but of Tracking Scripts. It seems that an increasing number of trackers that are being blocked by Ghostery (or other addons) will prevent users from fully accessing/using a website. This occurs while loading/interacting wiht forms or when trying to download a file or simply when loading a DIV. Webtrekk (used at cosmosdirekt.de) and Tealium (used at downloadcenter.intel.com) seem to be two examples for this.

The only workaround is to enable these trackers in the Ghostery interface and reload the page, finish what you have to do there, and then disable the trackers again.
I can't tell if this is due to bad code from the tracker or poor implementation in the website, but it is definitely a big showstopper on trustworthy pages, preventing crucial functionality from the users. I could identify the trackers causing issues by trial and error only as most pages nowadays seem to use 3 or more trackers at once (don't know why).
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    Eric P. Scott October 21, 2014 11:04
    Very rarely is Ghostery at fault; it's almost always a problem with that particular website, and usually something they could easily fix if they wanted to.

    Ghostery's maintainers are extremely reluctant to provide automatic workarounds (e.g. surrogates) that would only benefit a single site. Capitulating is not the only option; for example, user scripts (Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey) can customize almost any aspect of a web page's behavior.

    The issue with downloadcenter.intel.com has already been reported: https://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/... (and again, a little further down).

    If you're curious about why some trackers "break" (while others never do), see this:


    It's a little dated, but still a pretty good introduction.
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    good solution! good solution! (undo)
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