Ghostery Private Search

jlow , 4 months ago

Ghostery seems to be a GmbH(1) which is a German for-profit company. Does anyone know how they're making money?

(1) https://www.ghostery.com/privacy/imprint

Zerush OP , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

As a European company, it is obliged to comply with existing privacy laws (GDPR) in order to operate. The necessary income is obtained through the Ghostery Enterprise.
Similar to what Proton does, although Proton is OpenSource, they require revenue for the servers for the mail service and the VPN, but they offer these for free without ads or tracking in a reduced form, in mail with the storage limit and the VPN with a reduced number of servers (21 in 3 countries), financed with premium accounts.

There are many methods of creating income on the Internet and they are normally US companies that use the method of surveillance advertising, trafficking in user data, these practices are not used in the EU due to existing privacy regulations and even large corporations have to take care of them.
An example is comparing Microsoft's privacy in the US and the EU (where it is not perfect either but light years better)

Microsoft US (Blacklight)

https://file.coffee/u/7ARYu4LAWYCCg8BJUtJq5.png https://file.coffee/u/HqsYLyHwkbwforTYA_4a6.png

Microsoft EU

https://file.coffee/u/6FmNzLgTKw2wkFwO7wX__.png https://file.coffee/u/v6ir6K7UVYBLLFjPDMOes.png

Ghostery Private Search analytics Blacklight

https://file.coffee/u/9koHpgob19dDKlX1eVmrx.png

Webbkoll analytics (No third party requests out of Ghostery)

https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghostery.com%2Fprivate-search

I check the sites, services and apps with several Tools before I use them

https://file.coffee/u/k2Y_lDcOGaeiDLm4HTez8.png

jlow , 4 months ago

Ok, premium features, In think that's a good business model for FOSS and closed source companies.

Zerush OP , 4 months ago

The best, at least better than selling userdata. Proto use it since a long time ago, all its products are OpenSource, frr versions paid by the Premium accounts with more features, apart of the basics, mre gigas in the mail and clous and more servers for the VPN. With this they can offer an decent free service without ads.

Rez , 4 months ago

Is this service paid? If not, how are they making any money? All I can think of is a) selling users data (and lying) b) selling spots in search results, which means they'll be overrun with malicious links or other useless garbage. I don't believe they're just hosting a search engine out of the kindness of their hearts (:

drwho , 4 months ago

Hmm.

We'll see.

TGhost , 4 months ago

Trust them and they will F. You,

Zerush OP , 4 months ago

I don't trust not even my shadow in the web, but one thing is an online service, like a search engine, and another an installed app.

TGhost , 4 months ago

A search engine is a perfect tool to track though.
You click or not etc. And data are correlated etc.

Shamot , 4 months ago

Does it detect the paywalls and cookie walls too?

Zerush OP , 4 months ago

I don't use pages with paywalls which I can`t skip (very few), cookie walls don't exist for me, they are skipped all.

DolphinMath , 4 months ago

Another independent search company with its own index is great. Repackaging Bing and Google isn’t good enough. I’d be cautious with their privacy claims though.

Zerush OP , 4 months ago

With own Index Andisearch (using AI) and SSuite Groot Search, you can also use a meta search like E-Tools, it use several search engines which you can select.

Mojeek , 4 months ago

looking at it it would seem to be getting results via the brave search api

JackSkellington , 4 months ago

If it has anything to do with the ghostery addon that was bought by ad company, keep away from it

Zerush OP , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I don't use ad ons from Ghostery, nor the browser, the search engine is in my list good for analyze certain pages, as daily search I use Andisearch, Mojeek, Getpage and Groot, sometimes also LibreY, all these 100% "clean".
Addons I use are CanvasBlocker, SiteBleacher and a userscript to show the middlefinger to YT anti adblock. Ad and trackerblocker the inbuild.

Yesbutnotreally , 4 months ago

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

JoeKrogan , 4 months ago

My thoughts exactly... Hard pass

Zerush OP , 4 months ago

Yes, but the same as with Startpage. Despite the company, it's privacy features are already valid (GDPR), better as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and other privacy search engines, the only seach engines without any tracker and/or ads are Andisearch. MetaGer, Mojeek, GetPage, Groot Search and few more, but it's depend of which data is collected to put in risk the privacy, tecnical data are not the same as personal data. Ads and trackers are anyway blocked with the adblockers everybody use, the risk is only the logging of the user activity and this none of the privcy search engines do.

Cheradenine , 4 months ago

Yes they were, and they used what you personally blocked to better enable ads that would bypass their adblocker. They had some catchy name for it, I don't remember what. When they were exposed for their practices the privacy community did a mass uninstall. These features actually seem good, but I will never trust them again.

I tried to follow the link just to look at it, my firewall blocks it for 'tracking', I could bypass it but once bitten, twice shy.

Toribor , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Yes. If you use Ghostery and are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Privacy Badger. It's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is free and open source. Great piece of software.

LWD , 4 months ago

Ghostery was also intimately involved with what is now Brave Search, IIRC.