On Sun, 22 Sep 2019, Tomas Kuchta wrote:

How do you know that Ghostery does good job in terms of privacy?

Tomas,

I assume they do.

Is that from the first hand experience watching traffic and asking
Ghostery commercial outfit what they do with your browsing data?

I have neither the expertise nor the time to dig deeply. There's only so
much we can do to protect ourselves, just like we cannot ensure that a drunk
driver will not hit us as we drive through the city or on hilly, curvy
county roads in forested areas.

There's no way of proving a negative and I apply this rule to using ghostery
to filter ads, trackers, and others who want to learn everything about me.

Just asking - they are a company like any other, they do get to see your
web destinations, they chose to disable blocking traffic they deem not
intrusive or they think it would break your browsing experience.

That's true, and they deserve to acquire revenues. Perhaps companies such as
Ghostery sell information they collect in anonymous bundles that
characterize a defined group without identifying specific individuals.
That's a business model used in other areas of data, such as medical
information. Selling, or giving away, information on morbidities or
mortalities by postal zone or political boundaries can be highly useful and
has no need to have each individual identified.

As a hypothetical example, perhaps Amazon decides where to place warehouses
based on the relative numbers and frequencies of deliveries to cities. They
need aggregated information for this, not individual data points. State
legislators draw district boundaries aound clusters of voters supporting
their party and minimizing the number of voters who tend to vote for the
other party. Aggregated data can be monetized better than can individual
data that the purchaser would need to aggregate themselves.

Regards,

Rich
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