Ghostery has been offering desktop browser plugins for years, letting users see what tracking scripts are running on a page. This lets you know about ads, analytics, social widgets, and other tools running on the websites you visit. You can also block some or all of those scripts.
Now Ghostery has launched a mobile version: but it’s not a plugin. It’s a complete web browser.
Ghostery Privacy Browser is a free web browser for Android devices.
Like the desktop service, Ghostery Privacy Browser places an icon in the toolbar that shows you how many scripts are running on each page you visit. Tap that icon and you’ll see more details about those scripts… as well as check boxes which you can toggle to block or allow those trackers.
You can also open the browser’s settings and choose to block or enable all trackers by default, choose whether to block cookies, clear your browser history, change your search engine (the default is Duck Duck Go, but you can also use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others), and toggle support for popups and auto-complete, among other things.
You can also opt-in to Ghostrank, a feature which shares data about the trackers you encounter. That data is anonymized and used to create reports which Ghostery sells to support its consumer-oriented privacy products.
As far as basic web browsing features, Ghostery uses Google’s Android WebView feature so it renders pages pretty much the same way Google Chrome does. The browser supports tabs, bookmarks, and sharing. But overall the user interface and non privacy-oriented features are pretty basic.
source:liliputing et al
