The world of online advertising has changed dramatically since Ghostery first launched in 2009, helping people understand and block all the ways advertisers track them.
Since then, Ghostery and its ad blockers have gained a significant user base. (In Ghostery’s case, the company says it’s been downloaded more than 100 million times, and 7 million people use the app or browser extension each month.) At the same time, major browsers have promised more privacy features, and the European Union has even attempted to regulate the issue with a law known as GDPR.
As Ghostery turns 15 this month, TechCrunch spoke with CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz about the company's strategy, the state of ad tracking, and why he believes regulation isn't the most effective way to protect your privacy online.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We're here to talk about 15 years of Ghostery. Perhaps the best place to start is with you. What is your history with Ghostery?
I got really involved in 2016, about halfway through 2015, when we acquired Ghostery.
If you go back to 2008 or 2009, that's when the web really started to change. Before that, Google was a very private company, and it was just search, and there wasn't any big industry tracking to speak of. But then Facebook came along with all sorts of social profiling and stuff, and a group of engineers, myself included at the time (I was more on the search side), started to realize that we didn't like the way our browsers were sending signals to third parties invisibly.
So what you start doing is, you just block (trackers), which is basically Ghostery and (many other products) that came out at the time. Then you start seeing less ads, and of course you realize that you don't like ads that much. So you start blocking them. And eventually, over the last 15 years, the industry has been moving more and more towards third parties, and more and more things are happening behind your back.
And when you say you bought Ghostery, It was through Cliqzright?
Yes. At the time, Cliqz was a search engine. And we realized that as a standalone search engine, we needed a browser because Google wouldn't distribute us. Firefox was in league with Google, Safari was in league with Google. Basically, everyone was in league with Google, so we decided we had to build a browser. And because of the history I just mentioned, we wanted a browser that handled tracking and blocking and things like that. That's essentially why we were interested in acquiring Ghostery.
(The Cliqz search engine was later acquired by Brave, a privacy-focused browser, and uses this technology. Launching its own search engine.) Are you still interested in using a search engine and browser together, or using Brave and Ghostery together?
Now Ghostery is an extension, so for some people, there's the advantage of still being able to use the tools they're familiar with. If you like Safari, put Ghostery on top of it, if you like Chrome, put Ghostery on top of it.
Brave is a lifestyle change. I would argue that both are equally good, but we have a much easier time acquiring users. It's a very small decision, right? Just download the extension. You don't have to change your password or bookmarks. Everything continues to work as before.
If you look at Ghostery 10, we've put a lot of effort into making sure that the general user has a good UI. It's not too technical, it provides a lot of information, and it falls back if the web doesn't work for some reason. We spent a lot of time ~ No Assuming that users are brilliant techies who can figure everything out, we help them make the right decision to disable tracking protection for the next 5 minutes.
More broadly, does it sound like the number of trackers is continuing to increase?
The volume has definitely grown tremendously. There was a bit of a bump or a fork in the road when GDPR was introduced in Europe, where it initially went down, and then it has grown tremendously as companies have figured out consent hierarchies and things like that.
Currently, we are seeing a clear trend towards 3rd party cookies over 1st party cookies, but this appears to have changed again this week when Google announced that it will no longer be phasing out 3rd party cookies.
It's a little bit unclear what happens next. I actually believe Google wants to block (third-party cookies), but publishers, advertisers, competition authorities are all upset and say, “Wait a minute, this is going to hurt my business.”
And Google (this week) announced that they will let users choose. What’s very interesting is that they won’t tell you whether to turn privacy features on or off. We’ll have to find out, but the problem — and the reason Ghostery continues to be so important — is that you can’t trust Big Tech (or) regulation to come to the rescue.
I want to talk about two categories, big tech and regulation. You mentioned that there was a turning point where tracking went down a little bit under GDPR, and then it went up again. Is that because companies realized that they can get people to consent and agree to being tracked?
In the US, it kept growing, and in Europe, it was down dramatically. But then companies started creating consent layers. And once they figured it out, tracking went up again. Is there more tracking in the US than in Europe? Absolutely.
So you're saying that it had an impact, but it didn't necessarily change the trajectory?
It had an effect, but not enough, because these persistent layers are basically tricking you into saying 'yes'. And if you say 'yes', they won't ask you again, but if you say 'no', they'll keep asking you. But fortunately, if you say 'yes' and have Ghostery installed, well, it doesn't matter because we're blocking it anyway.
And Big Tech has a huge advantage because they always get consent, right? If you can't search for something on Google without clicking a blue button, they have access to all your data, and they have to rely on people like us to clean it up.
So when it comes to Big Tech and their browsers, they talk about taking further steps against cookies and other types of tracking. Do you think they've made any meaningful progress?
Safari certainly did at one point, and it almost destroyed Facebook's business. But you see, Facebook recovered, right? So they find a way because the browser itself is afraid of going (completely) because it has an effect on breaking certain websites. As Ghostery, we can protect our users and watch what they see. If you work on Safari and you have a billion users, I don't know. It's different. (Some reports say Safari has a reach of over a billion.)
I think browsers are going to be much slower than extensions by definition. We can get ahead of ourselves, but it's also clear that if we actually do what the user wants, browsers will eventually catch up.
Before we talk, I tried to track some numbers on ad blocker usage over the last 10 years. I don't know if there are any solid numbers, but I think Growth has slowed down Over the past few years. Do you think so too?
We don't really see it that way. When we ask people (if they use ad blockers), the numbers that come out are very, very high.
I mean, you're going deep into the mass market, so it's kind of normal for it to flatten out, but the need for it is still the same, the ease of use has gotten better, and (on more platforms) for example, for a long time it wasn't available on mobile, and now it's actually available on Safari (on mobile). So you can start to see usage increase, even if only by platform.
I also want to talk about YouTube, because it seems like ad blocking has suddenly gone from a niche topic to something everyone is talking about. Whenever there is a change on YouTube. From what I've heard, it's an ongoing cat and mouse game between ad blockers and YouTube. Will that continue in the near future?
I think cat and mouse is a dangerous game on YouTube because it pisses off the users every time they do it. This is something that we always find in surveys. People notice what we are doing at that exact moment. And they take us with them when they move (from one browser to another). We are the only constants. So yes, it is cat and mouse, but it is not as easy as good guys or bad guys. It is also about who does what for the users and who the users are attached to.
Whenever I talk to ad blockers about how much tracking is happening, I start to wonder why so much of the internet economy is built this way. We’ve talked about what individuals should do to protect their privacy, but is there any hope that this will lead to broader change?
Why is this? Because the prevailing business model on the internet for the last decade has been some kind of programmatic advertising, where you collect data on one side and make money on the other. That’s the root cause. Now users can change that. If everyone starts using Brave tomorrow, programmatic advertising will go away. Then publishers and advertisers will have to find other ways to make money, and they can. Magazines make money, TV makes money without all this tracking.
But if you assume that 70% of the population doesn't protect themselves, programmatic advertising is very convenient for everyone involved. I don't believe that regulation can stop it. The solution is always consent. Unfortunately, Facebook, Google, and Amazon will always get consent. I don't think the authorities have the courage or the will to say, “This is prohibited.” They won't attack it head-on, but they will try to attack it from the side.
So it's really about the user. The more the user protects themselves, the more unsustainable it becomes. That's the only change vector that's really possible.
