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I’m disappointed
sant7883 September 08, 2013 20:59

Whitelist site, Blacklist Tracker...

It would be great to have the ability to select which "trackers" to allow when whitelisting a website. For example, merchandise photos in Target.com will not display unless analytic "ensighten" is allowed. However, when I whitelist website, then all 7 other trackers also become allowed even though I do not want them activated.
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  • CHAMP
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    Eric P. Scott September 09, 2013 01:05
    Whitelisting a site unblocks all trackers on that site, without exception. It's a tool of last resort, intended for temporary use in "emergency" situations.

    Target.com got in big trouble a while back for booby-trapping their site so it would lock you out if you blocked Omniture (Adobe Analytics). They "fixed" that, sort of, but not really. What's appearing to you as Ensighten, is concealing a cloaked version of Omniture. Kind of like how the Exxon Valdez became the Exxon Mediterranean after it was responsible for one of the world's worst environmental disasters, or when the death-dealing tobacco giant Philip Morris tried to distance itself from its reputation by renaming itself the Altria Group, inciting confusion with Birmingham, Alabama-based Altria Healthcare.

    You could take your business elsewhere.
    (Like that's ever going to happen.)

    Well, at least you can express your displeasure by blocking their data collection servers, metrics.target.com and smetrics.target.com. This is something you do outside of Ghostery. The exact procedure varies by browser; for example, in Firefox, it's split between Content and Privacy preferences, while in Chrome, you'd open chrome://settings/content and click on Manage exceptions... Attend to this before unblocking or whitelisting anything.

    Getting back on track here, let's take a look using Ghostery 5.0.5beta1 for Firefox:

    Example: http://www.target.com/c/accessories-c...

    [screenshot]

    You see the breakage is a lot more extensive than just not loading images.

    Watch what happens when I click the little round button all the way to the right of Ensighten in Ghostery's control panel, and reload the page.

    [screenshot]

    That's a site-specific unblock. I haven't whitelisted the site, I haven't paused Ghostery, and I haven't allowed any other trackers free rein. And Ensighten is still blocked everywhere else.

    — — — — — — —

    Requested database change:

    In compatibility,
    Remove target.com from Omniture (Adobe Analytics) (aid 19)
    Add target.com to Ensighten (aid 459)

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    good point! good point! (undo)
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