Ghostery Midnight VPN suite busts app-based trackers on Windows and Mac

A spectre is haunting AdOps, and that spectre is Ghostery Midnight, a new desktop privacy suite and VPN for Windows and Mac devices. 

This new privacy suite aims to improve on the old Ghostery Browser Extension, by applying tracker blocking measures at the device level. A key benefit this offers is that you no longer have to have extensions installed in every browser.

While Ghostery could nip tracking software in the bud on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge on Windows and Mac devices, you’d have no way to stop any trackers present on apps like Spotify or Photoshop from doing their thing.

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Here’s where the control panel of Ghostery Midnight comes in, giving users granular control over which apps and services can and can’t track you.

As there will inevitably be situations where disabling everything will stop some apps from working properly, you’ll be given the choice of toggling between three options; fully protected, monitoring but not actively blocking tracker requests, and disabling all monitoring for that app.

On top of kicking trackers to the kerb, Ghostery Midnight can be set up to block ads in apps and browsers – this can be enabled or disabled as you see fit.

Ghostery Midnight’s built-in VPN also lets you choose from endpoints in five different servers across the world. Endpoints right now are limited to the UK, Germany, Singapore, the United States, and Canada, but as the service grows in popularity, you can expect that Ghostery VPN servers will spring up in other countries.

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Ghostery says that live traffic monitoring is the pipeline for additional Midnight features, but it’s unclear if other common VPN tools, like multi-device support, VPN kill switch – which automatically cuts your connection should your encrypted VPN tunnel fail – and support for third party VPN protocols.

Whatever features Ghostery Midnight brings to the table yet, it seems like they’d be easy to make use of, if the interface shown off in the promotional video is anything to go by.

Ghostery Midnight is a welcome entry to the already-crowded VPN market, and is currently available to try now for free for seven days, after which the $14/month (£10.74/month) rate applies.

That is more expensive than the standard rate of most VPNs, so cash-strapped buyers might be better served elsewhere. That said, if Ghostery offers the option to buy annual subscriptions, the effective price might fall. Trusted Reviews has contacted Ghostery for more information on this and will update this article as and when.