Webbugs: Ghostery filterset

ABPMan · Post by **ABPMan** » Thu Jun 18, 2009 4:26 pm

Hi!

I've stumbled upon this list.

Is the "match:" part between [] useable 'as is' in Adblock Plus?

Does it conflict with EasyPrivacy? (not talking about EasyList)

Should and will EasyPrivacy's maintainer update EasyPrivacy with Ghostery's database?

In the mean time, I've added it to my ABP filters; but it would be nice to have EasyPrivacy look over Ghostery's database every now and then

(Note: Ghostery is a Firefox extension that spots webbugs in pages, but does not block them)

Wladimir Palant · Post by **Wladimir Palant** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:07 am

Yes, you can use those in Adblock Plus as they are, only remove the "i" flag at the end (this one is implied for Adblock Plus). However, this will make for a very slow Adblock Plus filter list, regular expressions are not optimized.

Anyway, most of those (if not all of them, hard to tell for sure) are already part of EasyPrivacy, just in a somewhat different form.

ABPMan · Post by **ABPMan** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:03 am

Okay thank you

I didn't notice slow downs up this point, probably because EasyPrivacy is my only filterset.

Does the maintainer of EasyPrivacy read this? He could be interested in reviewing Ghostery's database more in depth in case parts of it are not covered by EasyPrivacy. Could you send him the link in my first post eventually?

asdf · Post by **asdf** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:41 am

Psh. Why bother looking for ghostery's database on the web? Here's something you can always do.

Save the extension's .xpi file form addons.mozilla.org (or if there's a development build at their own site, that's better). Rename the file to a .zip file and open it up. Look for that very same file. Every time the extension is update, you should see new stuff in it.

I did this when Ghostery first came out with a firefox extension. Just adblocked every domain wholesale, put every unique URI in my hosts file too.

ABPMan · Post by **ABPMan** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:58 am

That would take far too long for me to translate this database into ABP or hosts readable format, especially since I'd have to learn RegExp in the process.

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier has been of no help, and unfortunately http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check couldn't show me the many redundancies with EasyPrivacy.

Also, how can we differenciate between a filter that would go in EasyList and one that would go in EasyPrivacy? Aren't any ads from an ad company widely used accross the net, inherently "attacking" privacy?
Even simple images that seemingly give no information, have no parameters and have a basic name still give out our user agent, our IP, the time of our connection and the page we are visiting. That'd mean the only genuine ads have to come from the site we visit and nowhere else; otherwise we can be traced by widely spread ad companies, right?

So isn't EasyList also useful for privacy? It displeases me to disable non blinking ads, but I'm tired of all that behavior tracking. How can we be protected against those companies if simple images are enough to get them some data? Is EasyPrivacy enough to get rid of those pesky images or should I add EasyList to the mix? And then, would that be enough?