Ghostery (for Chrome) for Windows

Ghostery for Chrome prevents advertisers, social media, and other services from collecting your online surfing and shopping behaviors. Although Ghostery is a small add-on, it gives you more control of your online privacy and makes Web browsing safer.

Pros

Discreet design: Ghostery features an easy-to-understand design and a light, welcoming color scheme. The alert bubble is slightly transparent and blends well with the existing webpage, so you can see the content without interruption.

Wonderful execution: Ghostery notified us about dozens of trackers during our tests and let us select which to block. Images and links that we blocked immediately ceased working. We were impressed that stopping a tracker on one website blocked it for all websites.

Personal preferences: You are given the option of sharing your data with Ghostery to make the program more efficient and to share data with advertisers. But this is not mandatory, which is appropriate for those concerned about privacy. Also, you can back up your personal settings for use on another computer or browser.

Cons

Breaks formatting: Ghostery blocks widgets and links perfectly, but this sometimes results in websites becoming "broken" or not viewable. We had to test every blocked tracker individually to see what caused this problem, which consumes more time than necessary.

Bottom Line

Ghostery for Chrome provides you with high-quality service for free. You get full control over which content to block, which is a great way to protect your privacy. Disconnect, a similar application, shows how much bandwidth has been consumed or saved by using the program, and we would enjoy seeing Ghostery include an option like this in the future. If you are concerned about privacy and security, we suggest downloading Ghostery.