Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Ghostery: Plugin for Chrome to see who is tracking you.


Ghostery for Chrome provides a way for you to see who and what is tracking you during your web browsing.  I installed this as a curiosity and found the results interesting.


I thought that I would see e-commerce sites do some heavy tracking, see what what products I look at and what I buy so they can build metrics and offer better items to help close the sale.


I do a LOT of reading on tech news sites and their tracking is pretty heavy as far as analytics and advertisement, fair enough, they have large costs for content writers and hosting.


How about blogs?  Some blog writers don't monetized, some do monetize a little, some writers make a career out of blogging, and some only use the platforms default page view tracking.  I looked at a bunch of the IT blogs I follow and mostly found the trackers to be less than 5.

However, I was rather surprised about the amount of tracking that is being done on some forums that I frequent, as much as 20 instances on some sites.  I suppose forums would have a niche group of readers so it is more difficult to advertise to them to help recoup costs.