Ghostery play nice in Firefox?

Edit Subject

hi David, thanks for using Ghostery.

All 3 of the listed extensions work a little bit differently and cover different areas of browser defense. Here is the break down:

- BetterPrivacy's job is mostly in defending your local computer from tracker "droppings", which are various storage systems used to uniquely identify your computer (and thereby, who you are, or at least who the users of a given PC are) for the purposes of identifying and filing you away into a "marketable" demographic. The way it defends you is by monitoring Flash storage, and removing all Flash storage upon browser exit. This is a passive type of defense, but no less powerful in keeping trackers eyes away from you.

- Abine Privacy Suite is a collection of applications that are designed to actively and passively defend your online experience. By default, only one of the applications is installed: Opt-out and Block, so I will cover that. As its predecessor, TACO v 2. extension, its job is to mostly set a number of permanent cookies on your browser thereby telling the data collection agencies not to collect data on you. Additionally, this extension now provides a blocking functionality very similar to Ghosterys. The differences are in the database used under the hood as well as the size of the actual detected companies. In short, Abine (at least in its current state) falls a bit short from Ghostery and the original Taco it replaced in the fact that the new extension is overblown, installs a number of software thats not used unless more "apps" are turned on, OS specific, and finally, modifies core Firefox functionality thats not removed upon an uninstall -- just read some of their reviews. A fork of original Taco, called Beef Taco is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire... and is a much better extension for passive defense.

- Ghostery technology provides a fat layer of active defense and a smaller passive defense. I'll cover passive first: like BetterPrivacy, Ghostery is now also able to nuke LSOs upon browser exit. The big difference here is that in addition to Flash based LSOs, Ghostery also looks for and removes Sliverlight LSOs. Another difference between the two is that BetterPrivacy either needs to be "trained" or simply told to remove everything, while Ghostery uses an internal database to match offenders. On the active defense front, Ghostery utilizes another regular expression match list to both detect, and if needed, block web-bugs during a browsing session. This is a real time defense: trackers are identified and blocked from loading during a page load. Lastly, Ghostery has a team of privacy advocates that constantly work on the database to improve its matching abilities and add a broader coverage of companies that potentially collect data on you.

Finally, from my experience and setup, I use Ghostery with Beef Taco. I do not use BetterPrivacy simply because I have my Flash disabled.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need any detailed information.