Ghostery, is a Firefox add-on which reveals the name and number of Web Bugs and trackers, present on the web page. Web Bugs or Trackers are used to track several activities of the visitor on the particular page. Most of them are used by the website owners to keep track of their traffic etc.
Most of the site owners who track the traffic and people who come to their site track the following details :
- The IP address of the computer that fetched the Web Bug
- The URL of the page that the Web Bug is located on
- The URL of the Web Bug image
- The time the Web Bug was viewed
- The type of browser that fetched the Web Bug image
- A previously set cookie value
This helps them to analyze the traffic , how people come to their site, what they were looking etc. This FF add-on ( Ghostery ) will tell you about the Web Bugs or Trackers on the web page, and will tell their names to you. However, revealing the names and count is the only job done by this, you can’t do any other operation.
When installed it sits in the Firefox window silently and renders the info as soon as you visit and load a new page, the animation shows how it works.
It also displays the names of the Trackers in a black window on the top right of the page as shown below.
It’s fun to know and see what trackers are being used by web masters for their sites. Try out Ghostery ( Via Read Write Web )
Manav,
Thanks so much for checking out Ghostery and writing this up. I really appreciate it!
Cheers,
David
Thanks David, for giving us Ghostery 🙂