Light beam: shine some light on it
light beam is a firefox add-on that was created by mozilla, it uses an interactive visualization to show users every active first and third party sites that they interac with when browsing the web.
What are First and Third party sites?
First party sites(cookies)- are the sites one actually intends to visit either by clicking on a link or typing in the url in the browser.
Third party sites(cookies)- this are sites that are connected to the first party site that you visted, that may collect information about you without any explicit interaction.
The goal for the lightbeam was to make it easier for people to make sense of their own browsing data,to expose relationships -which are normally hidden- between websites and third parties, which gives people the tool to make their own decisons about their online privacy.(Emily carr,2013)
Three main design approaches were adopted to engage users possessing varying levels of technical knowledge and interest in privacy issues.
- The first approach – people with little technological knowledge – it gives them the means to view/explore their personal browsing history.
- The second approach – people already knowledgeable about privacy issues- helps them finds patterns,trends and relationships among third party sites and the websites that enable them.
- the third approach – simply lets users use what they find on light beam in real time.
How light beam works when a user download it
- It creates a record of events for every site visted as well as the third party stored locally on the browser.
- It then visually graphs these events to highlight the interactions between sites intentionally visited and the third party.
- light beam continously adds to your graph as you browse the web, but it can be stop anytime by either diabling it or uninstalling the app
An example of how light beam works
I downloaded the light beam app, and surfed the net on random sites for about 20–30 minutes, the result–the graph above–. The graph showed that for the 7 sites I visited I was connected to about 64 third party sites as well. Google seems to be the main connector of them all, as we can see its the biggest image on the screen and its linked to everything else, which is understandable–because its a search engine–, but as we can see it also links to other sites that i didnt necessary want to go to.(i.e the ones in plain white with no logos–all third party sites–). This raise the question of privacy and information
why is light beam important/revolutionary?
Light beams gives greater visibility and control over the which sites are being visited and it allows users to make a better decision about who they interact with. “a more open web means a better experience for everyone involved”(john shier,2013).
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