Is there a blacklist of ad and tracking scripts that I can download for NoScript?

0

I like to use NoScript during every day browsing since I find that most scripts don't contribute to my browsing experience and are best not allowed to run.

However, occasionally I will stumble on a site with lots of scripts, and I don't know which ones are necessary. For example, the typical mainstream newspaper article tends to contain:

  1. 1-3 script hosts that actually provide content (the site itself, a CDN, a Google script API).
  2. Around 10 "feature bloat" scripts, that add features such as lightboxes, galleries, feeds and other things I don't care about (I'm only there to read the article anyway). Usually each one of these, when enabled, tries to fetch 2-3 more scripts from yet more hosts, and you actually end up with dozens of scripts in this category.
  3. A few analytics and ad scripts, such as google-analytics, which are also on most other pages on the internet.

I'm okay with temporarily or permanently enabling #1 on a case by case basis, which is what I do. With #2, I definitely won't enable permanently if it's not a site I don't visit regularly, but allow temporarily is fine if I just want to see the content once and leave.

Unfortunately there are so many of them that I can't be bothered enabling one by one. My only option is to do "enable all on this page temporarily", but now I also end up enabling #3, which I don't ever want to enable for any reason. So, in order to deal with this, I move google-analytics into untrusted, and now I can enable all and google-analytics gets excluded.

However, there is still one problem: Obviously google-analytics isn't the only web tracker out there. At first I thought I could just do a quick search for the unfamiliar hosts I see as I come across them, and if any turn up tracking related things, mark them as untrusted. But it turns out there's a lot of trackers! Some sites have 2, 3, 4 different trackers, each tracking their visitors from many different hosts. Especially with corporate or big media websites, dealing with the initial barrage of scripts becomes very difficult because of this.

I'm sure there are people out there like me that habitually mark ad and tracking scripts as untrusted, or at least don't want them to ever run. It would be very convenient if someone who already did the hard work of compiling a list of the hundreds of trackers and ad servers on the internet uploaded it somewhere, so I could just download and import it into my NoScript, and have all the trackers and ad servers be blocked by default.

Is there such a list of hosts that serve primarily tracking and ad scripts? I am asking primarily for NoScript on Firefox.

Superbest

Posted 2014-09-15T22:05:28.887

Reputation: 1 739

Question was closed 2014-09-24T12:33:17.133

1I like this idea, but it's probably best submitted to the No Script developers and community rather than here. – music2myear – 2014-09-15T22:25:52.350

@music2myear It's not meant as a suggestion, but a question. The answers I expect are "yes, here's a link" or "no" (will be accepted if there are no yes answers after a few days). – Superbest – 2014-09-15T23:02:36.030

Answers

1

I use a combination of NoScript and a plugin called Ghostery. Ghostery specifically blocks known advertising and script farm domains. So even if you do an allow all from NoScript, Ghostery's dictionary still blocks the trackers.

Wes Sayeed

Posted 2014-09-15T22:05:28.887

Reputation: 12 024

This sounds like a working solution, but unfortunately it requires you to use Ghostery, which is itself unacceptable to some users. – Superbest – 2014-09-15T23:03:23.937

Asked: 2014-09-15T22:05:28.887

Viewed: 323 times

Active: 2014-09-15T22:31:50.053