AVG nukes stalking ads at press of BIG SHINY BUTTON AVG is adding active “Do Not Track” technology to its security suites in a move designed to give consumers more control over their online privacy. AVG's new Do Not Track icon lets users keep an eye on stalkers... (click to enlarge) The technology – available as a free service pack to AVG's free and paid-for consumer …
Does Ghostery have any way of making sites still work even if some of the ad / tracking calls are blocked? I blocked Google and Google Analytics, only to find that about a number of sites simply no longer loaded because they were dependent on these third party sites to work. If Ghostery or AVG have a way around that, then they may well be worth a look.
Sounds like it copies Ghostery's functionality exactly so active protection is available already despite what AVG say. I'll be sticking with my little blue Ghost thanks.
BTW Ghostery is pretty much browser independant itself. It runs on Firefox, SeaMonkey, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari (OSX & iOS) these days.
1. AVG comes with all sorts of bloated crap in the background
2. It works about half as well as any other AV suite out there
3. They blanket you with ads even after you've purchased the software to the point where friends and family regard it as worse than the malware AV popups
It's a total pile. Ghostery at least works, although I'm waiting for them to come up with something for IE - not everyone in a corporate environment can load whatever they want.
Would you not still be better off with something like Ad-Block Plus which removes the adverts entirely. Interestingly it was the registers stupid adverts for office 365 which kept randomly expanding and contracting that forced me to install it in the first place, and I haven't looked bak since.
I started to block ads back when adverts started using animated gifs by a few lines in my hosts file. Then they started making them flash with sound, so I moved up to Adblock, still manually adding the ones that annoyed.
Now its adblock-plus that gets them all automatically for me. Its the ad-men's own fault.
I would have left the ads alone if they had been text/static images. but make them too annoying and people want to block them.
But it won't stop all of the tracking.
Believe it or not a friend of mine actually likes that. He deliberately keeps the voice announcements on so he knows his kids haven't been arsing about and disabling things to make some "ooh free stuff" malware site work.
Though granted, I find it annoying as all hell.
I'd add Request Policy to that list. It prevents web pages even loading anything from outside the main domain. So, it does need tweaking intially to allow some useful stuff to get through.
I never see Facebook and Twitter sourced buttons anymore, and I don't miss them.
Most definitely it would need tweaking, since a lot of sites these days fetch data from CDNs that aren't part of the primary domain. For example, Youtube won't play videos unless you allow ytimg.com as well as youtube.com.
You and I might not have a problem with this, but from personal experience I know Johnny Sixpack has issues with it. When I installed Firefox with Adblock and NoScript on my parents' machines, I had to help them quite a bit while they were training NoScript to allow the various CDN domains these sites use.
It boils my piss having every bloody program want to install its toolbar. At least the Java update has stopped doing it.
Yes, its easy to untick, but then you have to wait for that screen to pop up rather than hitting the button to just install the main program.
And there are all the machines you have to fix for family and friends because they are surfing through a letterbox with all the sodding toolbars installed on their machine.
Give me a nice big advert with an opt-in click and I'll think about it, but I hate having to use opt-out.
As others mentioned; Mozilla (based) browsers have plenty of less intrusive solutions such as AdBlock, NoScript but another option could be to use 2 profiles. You know; in one profile you setup everything basically in a default or slightly strict setting. In your 2nd profile you block the whole kaboodle (no or restricted cookies, partial images, no pop-ups, etc.). This would allow you to use the browser in a 'regular' mode and a 'secured' mode.
Heck; even MSIE has known something like this for quite a while now; the so called "InPrivate" mode; just press control-shift-p while in the browser. This could be a little more versatile because in this mode cookies will be accepted and treated like normal; but they are only kept in memory. As soon as you close the browser then all of the cookies are gone too.
Now; I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't know about these options because all they do is merely "use the browser". So for them this could be a useful option I guess. But even then; if you worry about privacy yet don't worry enough to get to know your tools a little better I honestly wonder if merely "securing" the browser will help.
Its a start, sure, but how do people like that treat e-mail for example? "We need to send this to 5 customers so I'll sent it to 1 and can simply CC the rest". There goes your privacy again.
Forgetful of him.
Also slipped his mind, and the article author's, that tracking cookies, if third party which is probably always, can be blocked without any addons.
Allowing you fine grained control by sites is pure marketing, if a person wants ads + tracking off, they want it off.
MVPS hosts file can be found here <http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm> and does some malware also. And it's free.
Because a site that you've set NoScript to allow might one day be compromised. It has happened before and will again.
Don't get me wrong, I swear by AdBlock and NoScript. But they aren't the be-all-and-end-all of malware protection, they work as an outer pre-emptive blocking layer, while your antivirus/anti-spyware suites are your inner lines of defence for when shit gets past them.
of tracker providers tweaking the methods to evade the active tracker-blockers.
However, as others have found, many sites are coded to only work with JavaScript enabled, and the scripts that reveal content or follow links actually invoke the tracking/ad-punting functions and check for successful invocation to ensure that you have to be tracked. I'm pretty sure that this is no accident.
Case in point - if you try to view the Disqus comments on the Daily Telegraph site, you can only do it with skimlinks enabled. Even providing a script surrogate for the "skimlinks()" function doesn't help.
Recently? Forthcoming? Have you been living under a rock?
The EU "no cookie"* law was passed almost a year ago; but the ICO gave companies a year's grace in which to implement it... basically unless you specifically ask the user if you can place cookies FIRST you're not allowed to place cookies (unless they're specifically required for the proper functioning of the site; e.g. for session management, shopping carts and so on).
It's basically designed to screw over Google Analytics and affiliate programs.
*technically it's any tracking technology, not just cookies, so it could be user fingerprints built up from HTTP header/browser/IP address information for instance.
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"AVG is adding active “Do Not Track” technology to its security suites in a move designed to give consumers more control over their online privacy."
But they will sell your details at the drop of a hat according to their website.
Bloated load of crud I ditched ages ago.
But I will give them kudos for their live recovery cd.
A visitor to someone in the family decided to surf for prawns and infected the machine with the Metropolitan Police virus. Quite nasty in a way as the little chap disables safe mode via a registry tweak - this has to be manually sorted out later.
I had an older image on the machine and managed to do a file backup via Linux, but I knew it would be extra hassle again to re-install a couple of months stuff. So I had a crack at doing a 'disinfection' rather than a full re-install via image as I would normally do in 90 percent of cases.
The disabling of safe mode was a right little bugger, and I used about 5 other major av vendors rescue cds (kaspersky, bitdefender etc etc..) - anyway they all failed to catch the offending .exe.
AVG you done me proud. Slow, but thorough scan - dos interface - but deleted said file and the machine re-booted no problem. It took me about 20-30 hours of work over two days to restore the machine to it's former pristine state, but that is with re-imaging and security updates too.
I agree with AVG being bloat, but I have to say thanks to them for providing this rescue cd free of charge. Highly recommended.
Btw, Do Not Track don't do a plug-in for Opera, then again I have Ghostery, AdBlock, NotScript and my hosts file changed via Hosts Expert (MVPS), so I'm not sure how much I really need it.
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