If you're looking for a Ghostery alternative, there's a reasonable chance you half-remember something about it selling data, and you'd rather not think about it too hard. Here's the actual story, because it changes the decision.
What happened, and when it stopped
Ghostery used to run a feature called GhostRank. It reported which trackers and ads users encountered back to Evidon, the company that owned Ghostery at the time — and Evidon sold tracking analysis to the advertising industry.
The criticism was straightforward and fair: a tool people installed to escape tracking was generating intelligence sold to the people doing the tracking. Even with the data aggregated and the feature opt-in, the conflict of interest was real.
It ended in February 2017, when Cliqz — a German company backed by Mozilla and Hubert Burda Media — bought Ghostery from Evidon. GhostRank went with it. In March 2018 the extension's source code was published on GitHub, so the code can now be read by anyone who wants to check what it does.
That's eight years ago. If you left over GhostRank, the thing you left over is gone.
How it actually performs now
Reasonably well. Independent testing puts Ghostery among the stronger blockers, including on YouTube, and it handles cookie banners and tracker blocking as you'd expect from something built primarily around anti-tracking.
The two things that still catch people out are ordinary rather than scandalous. Trackers that filter lists haven't caught up with yet get through, which is true of every blocker. And some trackers are deliberately left unblocked because blocking them breaks the site — also true of every blocker, and the reason your features" class="doc-internal-link">ad blocker occasionally seems to "miss" something.
So the honest summary: if Ghostery is working for you, the historical reason to leave no longer applies, and there's no performance reason either. This page is for people who want to leave anyway — which is a legitimate position, since trust is difficult to rebuild and you're not obliged to.
If you want to switch anyway
uBlock Origin — the least complicated answer
No company behind it, no business model, no acquisition history to look into. It's free, it has never had a paid tier, and it's open source. If your objection to Ghostery is that a company owns it at all, this is the option that answers that objection completely.
Availability is the catch. Chrome and Edge users get uBlock Origin Lite under Manifest V3, which is narrower — no dynamic filtering, no per-site rule editing. The full version still runs on Firefox, Brave and Opera. We've written up which browsers still support it.
AdGuard — if you want tracker blocking beyond the browser
The extension is free. Its system-wide desktop and mobile applications are paid, and they cover apps rather than only browser traffic — closer to what Ghostery users often want, since anti-tracking people tend to care about more than one surface.
Adblock Plus or AdBlock — free, with one thing to know
Both ship with Acceptable Ads on by default, which permits some ads through. It's a checkbox away from off. They also share an owner — eyeo acquired AdBlock in 2021 — so moving between them changes less than the names suggest. More here.
DNDShield — including what we can't claim
We block ads, trackers and pop-ups, we've never operated an allowlist programme, and no advertiser can pay to reach you through us. There's no data-sharing arrangement with anyone.
But it's worth being honest about what that's worth as evidence: we're newer than Ghostery, and having no controversial history is partly just a function of not having had as much history. That's a reason to check us rather than to trust us. Our privacy policy is the thing to read, not this paragraph.
Where we're narrower: we're built on Manifest V3, so we live under the same limits as uBlock Origin Lite. If you rely on dynamic filtering, we don't replace it, and on Chrome nothing does.
Switching without breaking things
Your allowlist won't carry over — there's no shared format between blockers, so note down the sites you've permitted before you uninstall.
Uninstall Ghostery rather than disabling it. On Chrome and Edge extensions share a static rule budget; two blockers installed together can leave both with fewer active rules than either would have alone. Two blockers is not more protection.
FAQ
Did Ghostery sell user data? Its former owner, Evidon, sold tracking analysis to the ad industry using data from Ghostery's GhostRank feature. That arrangement ended in February 2017 when Cliqz acquired Ghostery.
Is Ghostery safe to use now? The extension has been open source since March 2018, so its behaviour can be independently checked, and current testing rates its blocking well. The historical objection no longer describes the current product.
Why do I still see some ads with Ghostery running? The same reason you would with any blocker: newly appearing trackers take time to reach filter lists, and some are deliberately left unblocked because blocking them breaks the page.
Is Ghostery free? The core extension is free. There's a paid contributor tier, but blocking is not behind it.
Which alternative is closest to what Ghostery does? AdGuard, if you want tracking blocked beyond the browser too. uBlock Origin, if what you want is a tool with no company attached to it.
Get started: Install DNDShield · How online tracking works · Compare free ad blockers