Ghostery is not really doing anything malicious, equally you do have to dig about on their site to see how they fund the extension/application. Personally the fact that Ghostery is owned by Evidon is the bigger concern as it`s clearly a conflict of interest although Evidon explicitly state that this is not the case for them. Call me jaded, however advertising and privacy rarely go "hand in hand" the bigger question is do you trust Evidon?
moving on, same as all software you install, it comes down to that one basic factor "
trust". If you really want to get into it, you will need the likes of "
Little Snitch" equally to analyse each and every outbound connection can be, and is time consuming, more so with 10.11.
For blocking I personally rate
uBlock &
Wipr for the following reasons;
uBlock
Is first and foremost open source, is highly customisable, also has advanced dynamic modes. Has no business relationships is first and formally a
privacy tool, not solely an AD Blocker
Wipr
Is simple in the extreme, once again no obvious business agenda, in isolation works very well. Only downside is no "Whitelist" equally I am ok with that, as my objective is to block 100% of non requested fields.
I have seen uBlock stall on Safari 9.01 & OS X 10.11, however with the inclusion of Wipr no issues observed. Whatever was depreciating uBlock, Wipr seems to deal with, nor does running both "blockers" in tandem appear to overly reduce performance. On my 10.10.5 system I sole use uBlock as I have not observed and depreciation of the extension.
Q-6