When browsing online, some users may be very serious about protecting their privacy. These users don’t want websites to track any of their information. You would be surprised to know that many websites track users behavior, collect and then share these statistics and some may even collect personally identifiable information. Therefore its very much essential to stay alert and protect yourself from such websites.
Protect Privacy and Detect Trackers With Ghostery Extension
Enter Ghostery, which is an extension for Opera that detects trackers, pixels, web bugs and beacons placed on web pages that you visit. These can be things like advertisements, social network widgets, invisible pixels used for tracking and analytics and more. Ghostery notifies you that these things are present in a web page and which companies operate them. You can learn more about these companies, and if you wish, choose to block the 3pes they operate.
After installing this extension, you can go through the start-up wizard which will guide you through the process of how this extension works. That’s all you need to do and you don’t need to configure anything else.
Now you can start visiting websites as you would normally do. If Ghostery finds trackers, bugs and beacons from any website, it will display those elements in a purple box at the top right corner of the screen. Alternatively, you can also click on the Ghostery icon from toolbar. In the below screenshot, you can observe that 15 such scripts and services are found.
Click on the icon of this extension and then on more info.
You will be redirected to Ghostery knowledge page which will display more detailed information on that particular service/script. You can expand two more sections namely privacy information and privacy contact.
If you are not comfortable about a certain bug, then you can disable/block that particular bug or block all bugs. This can be done by right-clicking on the icon of Ghostery from toolbar and then clicking on Preferences. Scroll down and then check mark Enable bug blocking. Check all the bugs that you want to block. You can also filter these bugs from drop-down menu below this section. When you are done configuring this, click on Save button.
Ghostery also includes an opt-in feature called GhostRank, which sends Ghostery servers anonymous information about the trackers name and where you encounter them. Of course this option can be disabled from preferences page.
After installing this extension, you would be surprised to know that many websites use such tracking scripts and services to track website visitors. No doubt this is a superb extension for Opera users to protect privacy and stay safe.
Opera users can install Ghostery from from official Opera add-ons page.
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