Techlore Talks Ad Blocking, Search Independence, and the Hidden Web | JP Schmetz (Ghostery / Brave Search)
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Feb 28, 2026 JP (Jean-Paul) Schmetz, privacy entrepreneur who built Brave Search and leads Ghostery, shares stories about ad blocking, tracker visibility, and why only three search indexes exist. He discusses browser-search integration, how trackers create real harms, and AI’s role in rebuilding the open web. Practical tradeoffs and avoiding becoming the family tech support come up too.
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Decide To Switch Browser Or Add An Extension
- Choose between switching browsers or adding an extension: switch to a privacy-first browser like Brave if you can.
- If you can't switch (work policy, habits), install a user-friendly extension like Ghostery on your existing browser.
Ad Blocking Tradeoffs Include Hard To Debug Breakage
- Ad blockers improve performance and privacy but can break complex transactional sites (banking, airlines) in hard-to-reproduce ways.
- JP warns advanced users must weigh privacy gains vs. the frustration of intermittent failures.
WhoTracksMe Traces Trackers To Companies
- WhoTracksMe evolved from a visual tracker-map into a database that identifies tracker domains and maps them to companies.
- JP says ad teams and auditors used it to inventory trackers for GDPR compliance and site audits.