How does ghostery work to protect my privacy?

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Hi trunk8, thanks for asking. Here is a short break own of the differences of ABP, NoScript and Ghostery and how they interact with each other and the intertubes.

- ABP is a great concept, however, its original intention was not to protect ones privacy, but rather, make sites appear less cluttered by removing advertising and other offending elements. As such, ABPs main function is just that: hiding (and removing) the DOM elements after Firefox has loaded them. This also reflects on the quality and targeting of the items in various lists (including easy privacy): the definitions are based on DOM ids, CSS classes, specific sites have their own rules and sometimes even on the precise element naming and sequence. So, while the elements are more often than not are no longer visible after ABP execution, the payload of those scripts or cookies has been delivered to your browser even tho ABP is running.

- NoScript is another great extension. Its power is that it uses whitelisting approach to script loading: it denies loading to all scripts on a given web site and has to be manually trained for each site you happen to visit. While a great concept, this is a power-user tool where it requires a lot of maintenance for training on the sites you visit and requires constant supervision during a web session. The difference between NoScript and ABP is that NoScript denies script downloading until a script has been permitted to load. Its also smart enough to detect if a script is attempting to download other scripts and will notify the user when this happens.

- Here is an earlier Ghostery description I gave to a different topic: http://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/t....

"Ghostery technology provides a fat layer of active defense and a smaller passive defense. I'll cover passive first: like BetterPrivacy, Ghostery is 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, whats the benefit of running Ghostery if you already have ABP and NoScript:

- if you are already a happy customer using ABP and have your NoScript trained well, then you probably will not have much benefit simply because you already have setup the sites you visit to what you consider safe. If you do visit many new sites in a day or simply do not want to go through hassle of configuring NoScript (and to lesser extent ABP), for every site, I would recommend giving Ghostery a try.

Personally, I run Ghostery, leave my Flash disabled, and when needed, turn on NoScript.