Ghostery is a free plug-in for Safari — and other browsers — that detects a website’s attempts to log your habits via tracking cookies and stops it cold. It installs easily and has a seamless but informative interface.
After downloading, Ghostery installs with a double click into ~/Library/Safari/Extensions. It’s easy to uninstall by just dragging it out of that directory.
The initial setup takes you to a webpage that allows you to configure it. Accepting the defaults will work just fine except that you’ll probably want to 1) enable bug list auto-updating and 2) Enable bug blocking. I just went ahead and blocked everything. (A bug is the term Ghostery uses to identify tracking cookies. Note that Ghostery is not designed to deal with Flash cookies.) It’s up to you if you want to additionally participate in GhostRank.
Web setup
After installation, the Ghostery icon appears in the Safari Toolbar.
Safari Toolbar
The advantage of Ghostery is that if you block all cookies, some other activities, such as online shopping may not work correctly. Ghostery only blocks tracking cookies like AdSense, Google Analytics, Doubleclick and so on.
The more these sites know about you, your IP address, and where you visit, the better job they can do targeting you with ads that may be of interest. On the other hand, if you don’t want information about your interests and habits collected without your knowledge, saved, and sold, then Ghostery can put a stop to that.
Usage
For each site you visit, the Ghostery icon lights up with a badge showing the number of tracking attempts. (See the Toolbar shot above.) Also, a quick popup on the upper right shows their names for a few seconds, and the strike-out indicates that the site has been blocked.
Tracking sources shown briefly (popup)
If you click on the Ghostery icon, you’ll see a larger, scrollable list of the bugs that were launched from this site. Icons for settings, the community, settings help and sharing are at the bottom.
Full Ghostery Report via click on Toolbar icon
This plug-in is so simple, the configuration page is basically the documentation. I’ve been using Ghostery for about a month and have had no technical troubles with it.
Full Disclosure
Many Apple customers take the happy-go-lucky, head in the sand approach to browsing. They don’t want to know what’s going on inside their Mac and browser; they just want to get on with browsing. However, the Internet is a scary place, and I would always like to have the option to know more about what’s happening. It personally annoys me that the browser can do so much and yet keep me in the dark on things like this. My philosophy may not be your style, but if it is, you’ll like Ghostery.
Bottom line: it’s clean, simple, unobtrusive, informative and free. It provides a valuable service and good information without getting in the way. Ghostery is also available for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6+ and Chrome.