Shine a light on who’s watching you with the Lightbeam extension for Firefox.
“Very Few people recognize that the interactions they have online are far more expansive than just the websites that they think they’re visiting every day”
– Alex Fowler, Privacy & Public Policy Lead at Mozilla.
When searching for a website or browsing a page online, you may think that you are only connecting directly with the site that you intended to load–but this is far from true. Today, nearly all websites we use on a daily basis have third-party websites or applications integrated on the platform that can automatically connect with us from behind the scenes. So, although we are technically visiting a single website, our browsing habits are being tracked by each and every company that operates on that site–without any awareness to the user.
In an attempt to bring more transparency for internet users and enable them to view what websites and third party websites they are being tracked by, the non-for-profit tech company; Mozilla created the “Lightbeam” extension for their open source Firefox browser.
What is Lightbeam?
The Lightbeam extension for Mozilla Firefox aims to help people better understand how webpages work and provide more transparency on the way their online activity is being tracked. Once the free Lightbeam extension is installed on Firefox, it will automatically begin to compile data from each website you visit and “create a real time visualization” between the primary websites you have visited and the third parties that operate within that site.
When you look at the graph created by Lightbeam, you will notice that the websites you intended to visit (i.e searched/clicked directly) are marked with a circle icon and the third party sites that are “actively sucking data from the page you visited” are shown as triangles that connect to the circle–forming a web like image. Even at a first glance, you will immediately see the variance between the amount of sites you intentionally visited vs. the shockingly high amount of third party sites you connected with (illustrated below).
My Experience
- Data Collection Period: 45 Minutes
- Sites Intentionally Visited: 20 Sites
- Sited Connected With: 369 Third Party Sites
Initially, I didn’t have any idea exactly what my results would look like after browsing the internet with Lightbeam for approx. 45 minutes. But, I felt as if my results would be fairly reasonable/understandable based on the fact that I typically spend my time navigating through basic sites like Facebook, YouTube, D2L and a few news websites.
The results were much more significant than I ever could’ve imagined. Out of the 20 sites I actually intentionally visited there was 369 other third party websites tracking my activity. That is 369 other websites which I had no idea were tracking my online activity and was never notified or prompted to “allow” them to be able track me. Looking at my graph results in awe, I began to think about how much personal information of mine must’ve been collected over years and years of daily internet usage.
Looking at the relationships between the primary websites I visited and the third party websites which were also collecting my browsing data, it was not surprising to find that Google seemed to have a significant connection almost all of the websites I had search.
Is Being “Tracked” A Concern?
Tracking–although it sounds like a concern is not always a bad thing. Alot of websites desire to track your data because it allows them to enhance the user experience and enables them to better target you with relevant information, news and content that best matches your interests–based on prior online engagement. The purpose of Lightbeam is to give users the ability to know who is tracking them, so they can determine when, how and if they want their browsing data to be shared.
To find out more about the Lightbeam extension for Firefox, check out this video by Firefox.
