Through the Lightbeam Looking Glass
Are you really sure about where your data is going? We all know websites have privacy settings and how some are better than others (Facebook, I’m looking at you with your greatly improved but still hidden privacy settings), but where does your information go beyond that one website you’ve visited? Have you ever really thought about who has access to your information, your viewing habits and your entire digital trail?! Luckily there is a way to get past these increasingly concerning privacy matters to discover what is going on behind the scenes.
This week I’ll be discussing Privacy and Security through the use of a Firefox add-on called Lightbeam. Lightbeam uses interactive visualizations to show how you interact with first and third party sites on the Web. It does this monitoring your browsing and revealing parts of the Web that are not transparent to the average user.
While many websites do have privacy settings in place, it is extremely difficult to understand how to adjust these settings and what other websites have access to your information. It is best to avoid OS browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari. This Press Up article talks about why Internet Explorer is a bad option as it, “suffers crucial security flaws requiring the intervention of Homeland Security” and the Department of Homeland Security had asked all Americans to stop using IE. Besides these bad OS browsers, there are some other concerns about using the internet in regards to privacy.
Here is my visual map of only 20 minutes of browsing from Lightbeam:
As you can see, I only actually visited 4 Websites: Outlook, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram- which is a subset of Facebook. Even though these were the only websites I chose to go to, there were 56 Third party websites that I was connected with. Analyzing my results a little further it shows that Outlook connected me to 22 sites since my first access such as Bing, LinkedIn, Office, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype and many others that I am not familiar with at all called “bizographics,” “atwola,” “evernote” and more. Watching a single Youtube video had me connected to 9 other sites since my first access, and this is how they can get the “recommended for you” videos as well as targeted ads without even being logged into your account.
It is pretty clear that the Internet is not something that is a private matter, and many of these other websites can gain information about consumer data through tracking without us having a clue. As Jeroen talks about here, websites have an interest in tracking what you do through various ways. They can look at which pages you are requesting, save small files on your computer called cookies, they can link or correlate information about you and your habits, finding your general location and even tracking what you type and delete.
The most serious offenders of tracking misbehaviours are the online tracking companies who actually monitor your clicks, searches and reading habits as you move around on the Internet. They have their codes embedded onto well known websites (so that’s where all the third party websites are coming from) and do not care about the ethics of privacy.
The main reason this is important is because the average internet user is unaware that this is happening or what it really means. You can have cookies installed on your computer, which you were never asked permission for and have your personal data spread to different countries around the world.
So, I would definitely suggest checking out Jeroen’s Blog post to read a little bit about what you can do to make sure you don’t connect to third-party trackers and make it much harder for them to monitor your behaviour online!
You can download the Lightbeam add-on here and see how many third-party websites you encounter in 20 minutes. Maybe it will open your eyes to see that nothing, especially the Internet, is as what it seems.
Follow me on twitter @Pnakatsu1 to join me in the conversation about digital technology and privacy and security!
