Detect Internet Trackers With Ghostery

Want to know when you are being spied on while surfing the Internet? Install this useful browser plug-in and take control of your privacy.

As you move from website to website, there is a part of the Internet that you cannot see. We call this the "invisible web".

Ghostery, a browser plug in for Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox lets you know when someone is attempting to track your behavior and Internet surfing activity. When you visit a page with tracking code on it, Ghostery will pop up a small message of the company and the service.

Ghostery maintains a database of tracking companies and will let you look at who they are and what they are up to. In essence, you will learn and have the ability to take more control of your surfing experience.

Here's an example. While visiting Myspace, Ghostery shows that there are 18 tracking companies on the home page alone.

At this point, what you can do is block selected trackers at will with Ghostery. By doing so you are creating your own blacklist. If there is a visual widget associated with the tracker, it will be disabled and appear as whitespace. In other cases where these are tracking cookies or pixel beacons, you will be disable those and not see anything on the web page.

If you mistakenly block a tracker domain, you can whitelist it, meaning that you are giving it permission to continue to track. For example, at the top of our website here at KerryOnWorld, we use the Facebook Connect widget. This is a widget that shows all our friends. In this case, you would want to leave this on.

Another example is Google Adsense. Many website publishers use this form of advertisement to recover costs associated with running their website, so please keep Adsense on out of courtesy..

Not all tracking companies are harmful. Take special care when you choose to create your blocking list.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.