“There’s a shortlist of trackers that we know are pretty critical to website performance, and we can selectively say that these, when they’re blocked, a web site’s not going to render properly,” says Tillman.

Sniping page elements before confirming that they’re ad trackers has potential downsides; a false positive, for instance, could result in usability being borked. But Tillman says that there, too, algorithms can help. If Ghostery detects that users start refreshing a page over and over, for instance, something’s probably broken, and an adjustment can be made.

The Cliqz acquisition has an ancillary benefit for Ghostery users as well, in the form of, eventually, a new business model. Whereas Ghostery and its previous parent company, Evidon, have historically sold its (repackaged, anonymized) data back to the ad industry and other interested parties, in the future it hopes to focus instead on establishing a premium tier of service as its main revenue driver.

“There’s a really big chunk of Ghostery users who use it less for the detection and blocking and more for the insights they get,” says Tillman. “These are educators, professionals, who use it in their work to analyze websites and analyze the technology on them.”

Smart Mode

Currently, Ghostery blocks trackers based on a library it maintains of over 2600 of them. You can decide to block as many or as few as you want, or to whitelist a given page, or to pause blocking, or to restrict certain sites.

That granularity has a lot of appeal for power users, but can be daunting for novices, or even experts who don’t want to spend the better part of an afternoon toggling trackers. Historically, Ghostery has blocked nothing by default, which has meant that you’re on your own to decide which trackers you want to spike and which stay operational. Simply blocking everything by default sounds like a solution, but doing so can break web sites in fundamental ways; videos won’t play, actually desirable elements won’t load, you name it.

Ghostery 8 takes more care than previous versions to walk users through those steps. When you install it, you're given a choice between a one-click start, or walking through a custom setup based on how much you'd like to block.

The one-click set up, which fires up Ghostery with Smart Mode, will make the most sense for the most people; it automatically makes those decisions for you, adjusting its blockers to maximize both privacy and page load times.

“It enforces a speed requirement,” says Tillman of the smart-blocking mode. “A website that is slow, we’re going to be blocking the things that would slow it down.”

That makes Ghostery’s Smart Mode in some ways even more appealing than the AI upgrade. The stripped-down interface highlights key information more cleanly, without first suggesting you wade into the minutia. It turns on smart-tracking by default. And it does its best to cap page-load speeds at five seconds.

“It’s much more personal,” says Tillman. “Just set it and forget it and let it do its thing.”

Even in Smart Mode, you can see which trackers Ghostery has shut off and which it left running, and can fine-tune as you see fit.

'A website that is slow, we’re going to be blocking the things that would slow it down.' Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery

I’ve been able to spend a little time with Ghostery 8 in beta, and it does seem adept at keeping out intrusive elements without dinging functionality. It speeds pages up noticeably, and combined with the smart anti-tracking steps, keeps them humming along as intended. And I'll be the first to admit that my previous Ghostery set-up was based on my best guesses of what trackers I should leave behind and which impacted my browsing. The one-click set-up was a relief on a few levels.

It’s also that degree of easy sophistication that Tillman argues will help ensure Ghostery’s relevance even after blocking trackers becomes table stakes for the biggest browsers.