Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability.

[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...

wait, why do they need users' emails?

If you want, you can create an account to ‘sync your ghostery settings’. The username of the account is your email address.

The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.

They don't, that's the thing; they wanted to monetize their service, and selling e-mail addresses and user data is one way to do that.

Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker.

As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

> As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

For now, sooner or later it's going to be mandatory for sure.

Indeed, and I personally replaced it with the EFF privacy badger plugin.