The Future of Ghostery

To the Ghostery Community,

Since starting Ghostery last year my goal has been to provide my fellow consumers with a free service built on the principles of transparency and consumer control. I am proud of the overwhelming response to Ghostery; over the past year, over 2 million people have installed Ghostery and joined our community.

Over the past months, as my focus switched to my new company, Performable, I made the decision that Ghostery should be in the hands of those who can give it the resources it needs to grow. I am happy to announce the sale of Ghostery to Better Advertising. Better Advertising is a company started by a team of privacy and online advertising veterans whose goal is to bring trust and transparency to the online advertising industry by working with companies, industry associations and the FTC to bring the best privacy and transparency to consumers.

Preserving Ghostery’s principles of user control and data collection transparency were paramount for me in making this decision. That is why, of all the options for Ghostery, including various offers for acquisition, a sale to Better Advertising was clearly the right choice. It gives me great peace of mind to know that I am leaving Ghostery in the right hands. They will not use any data collected from Ghostery for any type of advertising, a promise they make explicit in their Mission Statement and Privacy Center.

I have prepared a short Q&A to answer some questions that might come up in the near future:

1. Will the Ghostery service be interrupted?
   • No. While we’re transitioning over to Better Advertising’s infrastructure, we will do everything possible to make sure it is seamless.
2. Do I have to do anything or make any changes?
   • No. In the short term nothing is changing that would require you to do anything on your end.
3. Will my data be collected and used for advertising?
   • No. Better Advertising’s services are built from the ground up to specifically avoid collecting any type of data that could be used for behavioral advertising. Better Advertising also publicly pledges never to use any data it collects for advertising
4. What will Better Advertising do with Ghostery?
   • Better Advertising is committed to growing the Ghostery community by extending Ghostery across more Internet browser versions, and providing new services and features to our community.
5. Will the service remain free?
   • Yes. We don’t see making any changes to the service for the foreseeable future.

The Better Advertising team and I will be communicating more information in the coming weeks  and months. I will personally stay involved with Ghostery as I will remain an advisor to the Better Advertising team going forward. If you have any immediate comments or questions please send them to support [at] ghostery [dot] com.

Thank you all for your support. This has been an incredible experience!

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