One of the really valuable things about our Ghostery community is when users contact us via email or our support forums to give us the heads-up on scripts they think should be added to our database. Our users have helped us find invisible scripts of all kinds, including behavioral data trackers, other ad tags, research and analytics pixels, and page widgets.
Occasionally, our detection reaches a little deeper than intended. That was the case with Duck Duck Go, a search engine written and operated by Gabriel Weinburg. Gabriel wrote a nifty "My Karma" widget that found its way into the database of detected Ghostery scripts. That part's okay - because while that script doesn't do any kind of behavioral tracking, it does make some external calls to populate the widget data - so it fits in that category for Ghostery.
The problem is that our script detection also caught the functionality used for the Duck Duck Go search engine. If you have the widget script blocked (or just choose to block all of the scripts in the Ghostery list), your Duck Duck Go searches wouldn't work - which was a big bummer to users of both Ghostery and Duck Duck Go, and was never what we intended in the first place.
The most important bit of info here is that we fixed it. Block away - you won't prevent Duck Duck Go searches anymore. We'd also like to take this opportunity to make a suggestion - if you're a Ghostery user, we'd bet you love Duck Duck Go. Not only is it a fast, fun search engine with a lot of features, it's also built on a serious privacy platform.
Duck Duck Go with suggested first search string
Big thanks go out to the users that notified us of the trouble, and to Gabriel Weinburg, who was helpful (and patient) during the support process.
We're working on functionality that will group scripts into categories, which should make understanding and selectively blocking those scripts a much easier proposition. Keep an eye out for this feature in an upcoming release of Ghostery.
