Ghostery keeps places like Facebook and Google from tracking you

There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook tracking recently, specifically about how logging out isn’t enough to keep them from tracking you. It’s worrisome stuff.

So use Ghostery. Seriously, it’s great. It works as an extension for every browser and lets you configure what is allowed to track you, when and where.

Once you get it installed for your browser, you’ll see an icon with a number, telling you how many third-party sites are tracking your comings and goings on the web. From there, you can selectively turn on and off the “behavioral data trackers”, scummy “contextual” ad networks, evil in-text ad highlighting, social network sharing widgets, offsite comment engines and other privacy-destroying crap.

I like Ghostery because it’s focused specifically on privacy. It doesn’t start with a predetermined blacklist but rather lets you turn off tracking bugs as you come across them. I recommend hitting a few big aggregator type sites (Business Insider or the Huffington Post, say), which have no problem selling as much about you as they can collect, just to see how many tracking mines they lay down. Turn off anything that strikes you as evil, I tend to leave things like Mint or Google Analytics enabled.

As with many browser extensions, be aware that this may break things, particularly sites that rely on Facebook or Twitter to log in. That’s sort of the point. You can whitelist specific sites if you’d like.

I’ve been using Ghostery for a few months now and have been quite happy with it.