I tried to open the wired link and got a 404, then tried again and got a 504, then tried again and got a 503.
I then opened the lifehacker link, and it opened fine. The content of that link gives me the impression Ghostery may have had ties to ad companies. At the bottom of the article they link to Mashable as their source here:
Since the Wired article seems to be the only one I can't open, I guess it is unable to defend itself beyond the title of the article, which says that (1) Ghostery is now open source and (2) Ghostery has a new business model. Based on what I can see, it would appear to me as though Ghostery was actually owned/managed by Evidon. My interpretation of that would have to be that their OLD business model included selling information to advertisers. I tried to go to evidon.com but it was blocked by my intentional DNS poisoning (a sign that it is a scummy domain). After temporarily changing my DNS resolver to one of the servers hosted by
Which is clearly a business that is designed to help businesses monetize web services while staying just barely legal and maximize the amount of data a marketer can pull from people without getting in shit for not actually getting consent from them.
So, when you say
"It is not, and never has been, in league with ad companies."
Do you mean I have imagined all of the above? Because it sounds pretty shady to me that a company affiliated with Evidon and Crownpeak would be making a product line like the ones at Ghostery.