AD-BLOCKER GHOSTERY,Ghostery tool for web privacy ,Ad Blocker Ghostery Is Going Open Source,

The ad blocker Ghostery is shaking up its business model and open-sourcing its code in a bid to earn more consumer trust. The company faced criticism last year over its business model, which involved selling anonymized user data to businesses—not the kind of behavior you’d expect from a privacy tool.

Now, Ghostery is ditching that model in favor of two new revenue streams: Ghostery Insights and Ghostery Rewards. Insights will be a paid analytics service that gives researchers access to data about ads and trackers that Ghostery picks up as it blocks them, Wired reports. Rewards is a consumer-focused affiliate marketing program. If users opt in, they’ll be offered occasional deals on products they might be interested in—a sort of tailored-down version of the ads they’d be seeing constantly if they weren’t using Ghostery.
Opening its code for review puts Ghostery on par with other ad blockers and allows security researchers to scrub through the code for vulnerabilities. It’s a way for Ghostery to earn trust from the privacy-conscious kinds of users it wants to attract and to secure its product.
It’s possible that ad developers will also poke through the code, looking for ways to evade Ghostery’s blocking, but the company isn’t too worried about it.
“At this point, it’s pretty well known how Ghostery and other tracker blockers work, even before going open-source,” Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery’s director of product management, told Wired. “There will always be a cat-and-mouse game with advertisers that are trying to find new ways to evade our technology but, if anything, going open-source should empower our community of contributors to help keep Ghostery ahead of the curve.”

Ghostery tool for web privacy goes open source

Unlocking the browser extension's underpinnings could attract outside improvements and dispel 'conspiracy theories' about data about users it used to gather.

Ghostery, a browser extension that blocks advertisers and web publishers from tracking your online behavior, has opened up its code so anyone with some programming chops can see exactly what's going on.

Making Ghostery open-source software -- a program anyone can copy, modify and distribute -- means it's now possible for interested outsiders to get involved in its development, said Jeremy Tillman, director of product at Ghostery. And it should help clear the air lingering around Ghostery because of how its owner until last year, Evidon, did business.

"As a privacy product, especially one designed to give users a look behind the scenes at what data companies are collecting and doing with it, we thought it was important to give our users a look under the hood," Tillman said. Evidon offered Ghostery for free in exchange for user data used in its business product, an approach that "was hard to understand and lent itself to conspiracy theories," he said.
Ghostery, now owned by a German browser maker called Cliqz in which Firefox maker Mozilla is an investor, is one of a growing range of options to block tracking software built into websites. Those trackers are designed to build profiles people who visit websites, which lets advertisers target particular groups and thereby earn better money from ads.
But trackers also slow down websites, flatten phone and laptop batteries faster, and of course raise privacy concerns. That's why tracking blocking is enabled by default by browser startup Brave, partially by Apple's Safari and optionally in Firefox.
Millions of people use Ghostery today, Tillman said, though he declined to release precise figures.
Ghostery is free, but now as a part of Cliqz, there's a new way to make money in the works. In the second quarter, the Ghostery team plans to release its first version of tool that can help website developers measure the effect trackers have on site performance measurements like page-load speeds, Tillman said. It'll also let people investigate other tracker issues, like scrutinizing what tracker technology competitors are using.
Even as proprietary software, about two dozen outsiders were very actively involved in Ghostery, Tillman said. Making it open-source software means they'll have an easier time contributing and also that others could join in, too.
"We're definitely not pegging our roadmap to mystery contributions from the community," Tillman said. But making it open-source "gives them a channel to help us evolve the product."

 

 

IN PRIVACY-FOCUSED, ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden’s recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing up some confusion about its past.
Before Ghostery was acquired last year by Cliqz, a privacy-focused web browser, the company’s revenue scheme invited some skepticism. Ghostery made money when users opted-in to share data about what kinds of ad trackers they encountered across on the web. Ghostery then sold that data to companies like ee-commercewebsites, which used it to better understand why, say, their website wasn’t loading very quickly.

Many of Ghostery’s users struggled to understand the company’s old, complicated business model. And on its face, it just looked like Ghostery was selling user data—precisely what you don’t want from a privacy tool designed to block ads and trackers. “It was never a really great fit for Ghostery the consumer product,” says Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery’s director of product management.

So along with going open source, Ghostery is also announcing two new, simpler ways it plans to make money. The efforts provide a window into how a user-focused company might survive on the internet without violating customer trust—and borrow a page from publishers and content creators already eager to wean themselves from ad-based revenue.

The first part of the new business model will be Ghostery Insights, a paid, premium product designed for academics, journalists, researchers, and anyone else curious about the webpage and tracker ecosystem online. It’s not yet available—and not clear yet what analytics will be included—but the company says they expect it to arrive later this year.

The second part will be Ghostery Rewards, a kind of affiliate marketing system that users can opt into. Designed to be light touch, it will periodically notify you about deals, like a discount on a travel package or a pair of pants. Relevant offers will pop up when you visit say, a travel site or ecommerce platform. In one sense, Ghostery is removing all the ads from the web, and then replacing some of them with its own. But unlike traditional web advertisements, Ghostery Rewards are exclusive to those who use the tool. They’re also meant to be genuinely useful for consumers.

Ghostery Rewards is similar to the affiliate marketing used by publications like Mashable and Gizmodo Media Group, as well as by independent bloggers. (WIRED also receives affiliate revenue on some linked products.) “It’s 100 percent conversion based,” says Tillman. “That’s pretty much the target goal of the campaign, it’s not impression based, it’s not really for them to build brand awareness.”

That's a very different model from other popular ad blockers, like Adblock Plus, which is also free for users but makes money through its "acceptable ads program." If ads meet certain criteria outlined by the company, it lets them through—if they agree to split advertising revenue gained by whitelisting with Adblock Plus. The company also began selling its own, less intrusive ads in late 2016.

The decision to become an open-source company also has its own implications for Ghostery. At this point, dozens of major tech companies and even the US government contribute code to the public that can be used by anyone. Adblock Plus is also open source. By opening up, Ghostery is allowing a potentially more diverse group of software developers to help find holes in its system. That could be beneficial, but there's also the risk that by exposing its code, Ghostery could make itself vulnerable to ad-track developers who aim to circumvent them. "At this point, it’s pretty well known how Ghostery and other tracker blockers work, even before going open-source," says Tillman. "There will always be a cat-and-mouse game with advertisers that are trying to find new ways to evade our technology but, if anything, going open-source should empower our community of contributors to help keep Ghostery ahead of the curve."

Deciding to go open source, along with the new revenue streams, represent the second time in the last couple of months that Ghostery has tried to differentiate itself from other ad-tracking tools. In December, the company announced it was going to begin using artificial intelligence to automatically detect new tracking scripts. That's a departure from the standard practice of comparing scripts that appear on a website to a predetermined list of unwelcome trackers. In other words, Ghostery now attempts stop trackers it hasn't seen before, ostensibly giving it a leg up on the competition.

Ghostery needs to provide as much utility as it can to users, especially in a market where tech's biggest players have rolled out their own built-in ad-blocking tools. Google, for example, introduced a feature for Chrome last month that will block ads on sites that engage in especially annoying behavior, like automatically playing sound. The tech giant, which makes most of its money from advertising, ultimately hopes the change will help stop people from downloading tools like Ghostery that block ads entirely. Firefox also blocked tracking in private browsing mode in 2015, and Apple brought tracker-blocking to Safari last year.

“The problem I think with what Google is doing with their so-called ad blockers, is that it’s really designed to enforce and support their current business model,” says Tillman.

But ad blocking doesn’t merely threaten Google’s business, it also negatively impacts that of publishers and independent content creators. It’s a tension that Ghostery is aware of, even if its new monetization efforts don't address it directly. “We recognize that the digital economy needs an engine of monetization,” says Tillman. “Any long-term solution needs to include content creators and publishers.”

The ad-based system that supports the digital economy is broken, and often sacrifices user privacy. Many digital publications have already spent years working on new revenue models. For now though, invasive ads remain a part of the web, and even the people who block them need to make a living. Ghostery, at least, is trying to do so in a way that doesn't make the problem even worse.