Lightbeam, Who is Watching You!
I installed Lightbeam on February 17 and browsed for about an hour. I noticed that I have connected to 213 third party sites and visited 20 sites. The circular symbol represented sites that I have visited and the triangles branched out from there, represented watched sites or third parties. Also, connected to most of all these sites are cookies which are small files which are present in your computer. This site was called apost.com which did not look like a site that I had visited or browsed to, however it was connected to most the sites that I had visited. I researched it and it was a site that had ads on them. I found that these ads plays an important role on social websites such as Facebook. If you like something or find something on one site, they are able to know your search history and use that to pinpoint something that you might want to buy. For websites trying to know your personal history, it is a hot commodity for internet sites trying to lure people to buy their products. One site that I visited, called Perez Hilton is a site dedicated to gossip about all things celebrity, I was shocked at how many third party sites were coming from that one site but few were coming from news, real news such as CTV or CBC. Sometimes when visiting the Amazon website you would get offers about some of those products on Youtube at the bottom when the videos would start or at the right hand corner. After installing Lightbeam I am more aware of what is happening when I click on a site. There are much more websites that want to know more about you. I never really knew that there would be that many third parties gathering up information that they would later use to bombard me with or use to psychologically convince me to buy their products.
References
(n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2017, from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/online-trackers-and-social-networks'
Dashevsky, E. (2013, October 25). Hands-on: Mozilla’s Lightbeam is info porn for privacy geeks. Retrieved February 23, 2017, from http://www.pcworld.com/article/2057926/hands-on-mozillas-lightbeam-is-info-porn-for-privacy-geeks.html
What if I told you Mozilla’s Lightbeam extension … (n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2017, from https://memegenerator.net/instance/42487805
1. (2013, November 26). Free ‘Lightbeam’ browser add-on shines a light on who is watching you online. Retrieved February 23, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgeVsBSfI9A