General Options



  1. Ghostrank

    2. Help Ghostery by providing anonymous usage statistics. This is information about tracking companies and sites - NOT about you, the user. This information is shared with groups like the Better Business Bureau, who use it to be sure that companies are following online data collection best practices. It's also shared with the companies themselves, who (believe it or not) don't always have a good idea of which trackers show up where.



  2. Auto Update

    3. Ghostery tracker lists are updated on a weekly basis. If you wish to receive new tracker lists every time they are updated, you will need to enable this option. If you do not enable it, tracker lists will only update when Ghostery itself gets upgraded. You may manually trigger an immediate update from Ghostery servers by clicking "Update now".



  3. Blocking Options and Tracker Lists

    4. Trackers are page elements - scripts, pixels, iframes, etc. - that are normally "invisible" to the user. This table allows you to select which applications to block and which to let through. A checked application means that it will be blocked next time it is encountered on the Web.

    There are separate lists for trackers and cookies. Switching to the Cookies tab, and selecting one or more cookies will tell Ghostery to deny all attempts to create or modify those cookies.

    The tracker browser is currently divided into broad categories that you may drill into by clicking on the category name. Furthermore, each app will have more information accessible by clicking on the app name. Filters are available to help you quickly find newly updated trackers, or unblocked/blocked apps in the "Show" dropdown. The "Search for" field allows you to quickly perform a search through the applications available in the database. There are also quick controls under the filters that are self explanatory.

    Site whitelist — you may add sites to this list to prevent tracker blocking on these sites. Commonly used when you want either support a particular site, or when you feel that something is not working on the site because of Ghostery's blocking.



  4. Save and Cancel

    5. Please note that unless you press "Save", the options for Ghostery will not be saved. Cancelling will close Ghostery's options page without saving.





Advanced Options



  1. Display Options

    2. Configure the way Ghostery is displayed in your browser window. You can hover over dash-underlined text to see a help tooltip.



  2. Auto Update Advanced Settings

    3. These auto-update advanced options define what happens when an update to the tracker list occurs. "Block new elements by default" will automatically set all newly downloaded tracker apps to be blocked. "Notify me of new elements" will trigger a gray notification box to let you know that an update has occured and that there were new elements in the library. The gray box is clickable and will take you to the tracker browser, prefiltered to display only new trackers.



  3. Click-to-Play Options

    4. Ghostery will replace certain potentially useful content with "click-to-play" overlays. Click-to-Play makes it clear what happened on the page, and provides in-page controls to either temporarily or permanently allow the blocked element. The options here allow you to disable this behavior. Disabling Click-to-Play may speed up Ghostery.



  4. Performance Options

    5. Ghostery can be configured to check for several different kinds of page elements. Disabling these options will allow Ghostery to run faster, but it also means Ghostery will detect and block fewer elements.

    images — Images can be used as tracking mechanisms, like in the case of tracking pixels. If this option is enabled, Ghostery will detect and block images from companies in our library.

    iframes — The iframe tag is a commonly used element to deliver advertisements and other tracking elements. If this option is enabled, Ghostery will detect and block iframes from companies in our library.

    objects — The object tag is another container that can include images, audio, videos, etc. If this option is enabled, Ghostery will detect and block object tags from companies in our library.

    redirection — Some pixels and other scripts use internet redirects to deliver content from different companies. If this option is enabled, Ghostery can keep an eye on these redirects and detect and block the resulting content.