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fredvries July 11, 2010 10:02

Undetected webbugs?

I've just installed MAXA Cookie Manager and it has a feature that finds and removes webbugs. When I visited ghostery.com it detected opt.fimserve.com and tumblr.com. When I wanted to report that these webbugs weren't detected by Ghostery, I went to this site, getsatisfaction.com, and to my surprise MAXX did again find a webbug (getsatisfaction.com).
Shouldn't Ghostery detect and block these webbugs too?
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  • CHAMP
    Felix Shnir July 12, 2010 01:45
    Hi fredvries, thanks for using Ghostery.

    Ghostery differs from MAXA in several aspects. First, Ghostery, does not block cookies, but deletes them on exit (if you have selected such option) in Firefox only.

    Second, Ghostery notifies and blocks (if so selected) web bug requests from an internal list. The difference here is that MAXA Cookie Manager sees the actual cookies created, while Ghostery attempts to stop them from happening in the first place.

    Last note: IE Ghostery, sadly, is only about 3/4 as effective as Firefox release. Main reason for that is that IE plugin does not have the same access rights and visibility as Firefox blocker: technically, Ghostery in IE scans and blocks
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  • fredvries July 12, 2010 17:49
    Hi Felix,

    If fear you misunderstand my question. What I discovered was that MAXX found webbugs while Ghostery didn't. Which is strange. So I was wondering if Ghostery uses some sort of whitelist and doesn't report on its own webbugs, perhaps the ones that report back as GhostRank.
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  • CHAMP
    Felix Shnir July 12, 2010 18:07
    fred, as I said, there is a fundamental difference in how Ghostery operates and how MAXA does.

    MAXA only sees cookies after an event -- after a browsing session, MAXA will examine cookies left by various tracking system and report on them. Ghostery operates in a context of a page load. As such, it prevents actual loading of the 3rd party web bugs. Ghostery uses a regular expression based matcher to find our targets during a page load. MAXA only uses domain based matching, since thats how the cookies are stored/assigned.

    So, there are great many ways for a cookie to be delivered to a browser that Ghostery for example would ignore: one such example is getsatisfaction. Here is the expanded example:

    If you go to http://www.ghostery.com/apps/getsatis... (getsatisfaction app page on Ghostery), you should see that Ghostery blocks getsatisfaction widget. After that visit, you will not receive a getsatisfaction cookie.

    Now, lets say you clicked through to this page (http://getsatisfaction.com/ghostery/t.... Since getsatisfaction.com is the root URL you are visiting, Ghostery will not react when a cookie is set here for you (such as login session cookie or whatnot).

    Is this a bit clearer?
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