Ghostery used to belong to a company named Evidon, which had this business model of collecting data to sell it in some form (the feature was called "Ghostrank"). In 2017, Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz (which builds an independent and private search engine from Germany), and since then a few things happened: (1) the extension was open-sourced, (2) Ghostrank was completely removed and (3) Ghostery is now developing paid products as a business model. For example we launched Ghostery Insights[1] and Ghostery Midnight[2] recently, both of which are subscription-based.
Thank you for the update! I contacted Ghostery back in 2017, though I don't recall when exactly, and at that time I received a response from a salesperson. I was working on a project to try and understand market share of digital marketing software across the web at the time.
Ghostery used to belong to a company named Evidon, which had this business model of collecting data to sell it in some form (the feature was called "Ghostrank"). In 2017, Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz (which builds an independent and private search engine from Germany), and since then a few things happened: (1) the extension was open-sourced, (2) Ghostrank was completely removed and (3) Ghostery is now developing paid products as a business model. For example we launched Ghostery Insights[1] and Ghostery Midnight[2] recently, both of which are subscription-based.
[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/insights/ [2]: https://www.ghostery.com/midnight/