Photo by: Lee J. Haywood
Ricardo Bilton’s recent Venturebeat article Ghostery: A Web tracking blocker that actually helps the ad industry indeed raised my eyebrow to heights it has not seen in years. Not only is this article vague and incohesive, but the tone set and implications made were so misleading that it warranted clarifications from Ghostery over the last couple of days. There’s lots of nitpicking that can be made here, but I’ll limit this discussion to the three biggest issues.
For those of you who don’t know, Ghostery is a brower tool that detects advertising trackers and provides users with the opportunity of blocking them. Evidon, an enterprise formerly known as Better Advertising, owns Ghostery and the majority of criticism that Ghostery receives stems directly from this relationship.
This conflict of interest angle is used by Bilton who argues that Evidon “deviously” concocted the idea of selling information obtained from its userbase back to advertisers and trackers. When installing Ghostery, the user is given the option to participate in what is knows as “GhostRank.” While Ghostery was on the defensive today on twitter, they provided this which clearly defines what GhostRank is:
GhostRank is the opt-in feature you’ll find under the red “PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY” text in the Ghostery options menu. Enabling GhostRank means that you anonymously participate in an information-gathering panel designed to improve Ghostery performance and create a census of advertisements, tracking beacons, and other page scripts across the web.
Here is Bilton’s closest attempt
At Evidon’s core is Ghostery, a browser extension that allows users to block any and all the web trackers they encounter while browsing the web. A more hardcore subset of these users, called “GhostRank” even anonymously sends that data back to Evidon, which adds the trackers to its database.
I’ll just go ahead and leave it at that.
So, now that we established that you have the option to share your data, what exactly happens should you decide to participate in GhostRank? Bilton is under the impression that data collected is used by advertisers and trackers to keep better tabs on whether advertisements or tracking scripts are actually being executed by websites. I have been having trouble verifying this, but Ghostery’s explaination, not so much. In fact, if you click on the aforementioned link, Ghostery’s take can be found just a few paragraphs below their explaination of GhostRank.
Ghostery is owned by Evidon, which despite its earlier moniker “Better Advertising”, is NOT (and never was) an advertising company. Evidon doesn’t sell ads, create ads, or deliver ads. It doesn’t help target ads, optimize ads, or localize ads. It doesn’t collect information about ad interaction. It doesn’t print ads in newspapers or on billboards… really, it’s not at all about the ads themselves. What Evidon does do is help advertisers and networks comply with industry standards for the use of data while advertising. Online advertisers aren’t clueless – they know that users tend to find behavioral advertising a little creepy. So along with following the FTC’s principles for online behavioral advertising, they’ve created their own self-regulatory standards. These efforts represent a big step in the right direction to give users the information they need to make decisions about their online advertising experience. Evidon provides technology to help advertisers and networks meet those standards, and gives them reports to illustrate that they’re complying across the web.
As Bilton concludes his article, he does point out the self-regulation aspect of Evidon’s data collection and subsequent leasing of it. The manner in which he chooses to do so has somewhat of a positive tone to it:
Perhaps most key is that Evidon is leading the ad industry’s charge for self-regulation, an effort that’s becoming more important as the number of advertising networks continues to climb.
It’s a sharp contrast from the choice of words used earlier in the article such as “devious” and “plan of attack.” It’s this sharp contrast and shift in tone which has me puzzled over the article’s title: “Ghostery: A Web tracking blocker that actually helps the ad industry.” I can’t tell whether that’s a good or bad thing according to Bilton. What I can see is how some readers can interpret it as a bit misleading after having read this article.
