Lightbeam — Who’s Tracking You?
Using this add-on for Mozilla Firefox brought to my attention how many third party websites are attached to websites I browse daily. It’s shocking to see how many of these websites surface from just visiting a few sites. I’ve never used Lightbeam before, so it was interesting to see these third-party websites branch and bounce off the primary sites I visited.
First, Lightbeam is very simple to use. I just downloaded it and right away there were instructions on how to use the add-on. It basically tracks the websites you visited and the third-party websites that are attached with them. In the image below, you can see that there is an easy to read legend. The white circles are the sites visited, the white triangles are the third party websites, and the white lines are the connections. Further, the legend also shows watched sites, blocked sites, and cookies. The watched sites are blue circles or triangles, and the blocked sites are pink circles or triangles. The cookies are purple lines.
The sites I visited were Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Twitch, Twitter, Medium, Sephora, and My.Ryerson. I noticed that the bigger circles indicated that more third-party websites were associated with them. The biggest was Sephora, which made sense because Sephora is such a huge company chain that sells hundreds of other brands, with many transactions made everyday. The second was Twitch, followed by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, then My.Ryerson. With no surprise, My.Ryerson had the least. This is probably because it is a university associated website, and having too many third-party websites could affect its privacy. However, third-party websites aren’t necessarily bad. For example, when a transaction is made on Sephora, it has to be made through online banking or PayPal.
Another thing I noticed in my graph were the third party cookie connections. There were some emerging from YouTube, Yahoo, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and the most from Sephora. Again, Sephora probably has a lot of third party cookies from various brand advertisers targeted towards the user. Nonetheless, it may be uneasy for users to know the amount of third-party websites attached to their regular browsing that are tracking their interactions with the web. Lightbeam was a great tool to use and understand third party connections. I would definitely recommend it to users who frequently browse the web. Find out who’s tracking you now with Lightbeam!
-Alex Zhang
