http://ajax.googleapis.com tracker not yet detected

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However, Google still get referrers every time you visit a site using googleapis provided jquery and that is a lot of sites these days.

If they're not tracking through googleapis (I can't find any such statement) then they shouldn't mind if we strip the referrer and just appear to be making a direct request to http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax...

You've got to ask the question, why do you think Google provide these scripts hosted on a high quality CDN for free?

I find it incredible the amount of detail put into Ghostery. However I see such a big tracking operation being allowed to continue without our ability to even strip the referrer sent to Google. Ideally there would be a simple way to serve these standard jquery files up locally and not connect to Google at all.

Please see https://developers.google.com/speed/l... for information about what googleapis.com is used for. Webmasters choose to use Google hosted libraries because it makes their pages load faster, and offloads traffic from their networks. Since googleapis.com is a cookieless domain, frequently-used libraries (such as jQuery) can be cached locally. Note that Google sets a one-year expiration and specifies Cache-Control: public with a max-age of 365 days. Yes, they'll collect some referrers, but they've done everything they can to not have this "phone home" every time.

Google is a publicly-traded corporation, and has agreed to oversight of their privacy practices by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for the next 20 years. At this point, they are probably among the most trustworthy companies out there.

I should add that Google Chrome 17 implemented a proposal to allow pages to disable sending referrer information. http://code.google.com/p/chromium/iss...

Firefox considered it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug...

It is true that webmasters choose to use googleapis to reduce their bandwidth and supposedly improve load times for users (although that claim is dubious as it'll only improve the very first load of a site).

I could go into further detail but it's not relevant to the problem and the sites you link to do nothing to reassure, where's the guarantee of privacy you're getting from them?
The Chromium team implementing a webkit wide fix that will only be utilised by a small number of sites doesn't change my opinion much either. Another red herring is cookies, they are not the risk, take a look at your unique browser fingerprint http://ip-check.info/

Every time, yes, every time you load a non-Google page which references googleapis as the place to grab jquery; it'll let them know your IP, the exact URL you're on and your browser fingerprint; couple that with their multitude of other services you may be using and this can easily add up to who you are, where you are, what you're doing and when. If referrers are disabled or jquery was referenced from a different location then Google lose one hook they have to track user behaviour, it simply doesn't need to happen.

I'm not looking for Ghostery to block googleapis.com, that'd break functionality across the web and they're hosting standard files which literally could be anywhere but if they're not interested in tracking through providing this service (although I can't see another reason they'd give away use of a really expensive CDN)... then they'd not be bothered by a handful of privacy concious users not giving them a bunch of tracking data.

Google give away excellent services for "free", these all come with the caveat that they'll track what you do and use this data to sell targeted advertising (at least for now).
Normally if one doesn't like a company they can simply not use their products but this isn't currently possible with Google; they're burrowing their way into so many places you really struggle to avoid them, even if you never load a Google page they're building a profile on you and I wish I could escape...

Given the scale and efficiency with which Ghostery is stopping other tracking devices, it seems absurd that you wouldn't want it to stop the biggest collector of personal data that exists.