Shining a spotlight on online data tracking to help people understand the Web around them. That’s what we set out to accomplish a little more than a year ago as we began building on a popular, experimental add-on for Firefox called Collusion.
While revelations about government surveillance continue to stun people around the world, there’s another area of online data collection with its own complicated transparency challenges that remains important to users. And that’s the diverse range of third party companies that shape so much of our online experiences today from advertising to social sharing to personalisation. Third parties are an integral part of the way the Internet works today. However, when we’re unable to understand the value these companies provide and make informed choices about their data collection practices, the result is a steady erosion of trust for all stakeholders.
Today, we’re proud to announce the release of the next iteration of Collusion, which we’re now calling Lightbeam for Firefox. The release happened at at this year’s MozFest.
The Firefox Browser blocks most trackers automatically, so there’s no need to dig into your security settings. See your protection report. Firefox is for everyone. Available in over 90 languages, and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux machines, Firefox works no matter what you’re using or where you are. Make sure your operating system. Nov 04, 2013 Recently, Mozilla released a new add-on for Firefox called Lightbeam. The primary purpose of Lightbeam is to help people better understand.
Lightbeam, which was first published as an experimental release named Collusion, is an extension for Firefox and was released by Mozilla in 2013 to help users understand the array of first and third party companies people interact with every day across the Web. Once installed, Lightbeam created a real-time visualization of the websites you visit and all third-party trackers active on those pages.
Lightbeam is an add-on for Firefox that brings to light the array of firstand third party companies people interact with everyday across the Web. Development of Lightbeam for Firefox is developed with support from the Ford Foundation and theNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and aided by faculty and students of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
How Lightbeam for Firefox works:
- Visualise the Web: After you download and install the Lightbeam add-on to Firefox, it will begin to create a real time visualisation of the websites you visit and all the third parties that are also active on those pages.
- Analyse your connections: As your visualisation grows, you can take a closer look into the relationships between the various first and third party sites that are stored in your data. You can also reset or save your data.
- Contribute open data: As a part of Lightbeam, we’re creating a big-picture view of Web tracking and of how first and third party sites are connected to each other. To help us, you can contribute your data to our Lightbeam database. Call it a Wizard of Oz moment for the Web, where users can collectively pull back the curtain see its inner-workings.
- Support for publishers: During development of Lightbeam for Firefox, we worked with a number of leading online publishers about the value of the crowdsourced data. More work is needed, though. Once the open data set has time to mature, we’ll continue to explore how publishers can benefit from additional insights into the interaction of third parties on their sites.
At Mozilla, we believe that everyone should be in control of their user data and privacy, and we want to help you have the ability to make informed decisions about your Web experience. With the Lightbeam for Firefox add-on and open data, we’re providing a valuable community research platform to raise awareness, promote analysis and, ultimately, affect change in the area of privacy.
Lightbeam for Firefox is still in an early stage of development, this being only the second release of the add-on. All of the code is posted to Github and available for the Mozilla community to hack, expand and improve. Lightbeam is now live, and the add-on is available to download.
Lightbeam is being released at this year’s MozFest, Mozilla’s largest public-facing event. All throughout the weekend participants will be brainstorming and prototyping both technology and curriculum to help better educate web users about privacy.
Firefox addon that tracks visited websites and shows connections to the third-party tracking services you interact with while browsing the Internet
Lightbeam is a Firefox addon developed by Mozilla in an attempt to provide you with a simple and comfortable manner of visualizing first and third-party services that might be tracking you browsing habits, along with the relationship between these services and the sites you visit.
The trend nowadays on the web is to disregard user needs to the extent where tracking companies and services are no longer transparent, as they should be. Although not all tracking is bad, a big part of it certainly is and, unfortunately, there are few ways to reveal the ins and outs of this type of behavior.
Discover tracking-related relationships between visited websites and third-party services
Lightbeam comes across as a daring initiative that delivers an objective analysis of your online activity. It reveals the most hidden corners of the web, shedding some light into how tracking works and enabling you to interactively view active third-parties, as they connect to your data. The idea behind it is to continuously monitor the websites you visit, generating a real-time overview of all the parties that you connect to and which get connected to you.
View an interactive graph with watched and blocked sites
All of this information is comprised in a graph view, which displays the relationship between the sites you visit and third-party companies that have been detected during the process. The more sites, the larger the visualization diagram is, with emphasis on each request you make from Firefox. It displays visited and third-party sites, connections, watched and blocked sites, along with cookies.
View detailed information about visited websites
There's also a list view with details on each visited site, including its type (e.g. visited, third party), prefs, first and last access time, along with the number of connected sites. You can view the server location in a world map, block any site with one click, hide it from the list, or ask the tool to watch any page. The collected data can be exported externally, in a JSON file, in case you want to review it later.
Activate an experimental tracking protection feature
The current version of Lightbeam also includes an experimental feature designed to prevent some websites from tracking your activity by blocking certain elements. However, the developer doesn't specify the supported sites for this feature.
All in all, Lightbeam seems like a great asset that any user should take advantage of, considering the amount of information it reveals at no cost. It worked smoothly with the latest Firefox version during our tests.
Filed under
Firefox Lightbeam was reviewed by Elena Opris4.5/5
![Lightbeam for firefox download Lightbeam for firefox download](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126647963/848287641.png)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
New in Firefox Lightbeam 2.0.4:- Fixes for the Tracking Protection toggle.
- Neatening remove button warning.
Firefox Lightbeam 3.0.1
add to watchlistsend us an update 4 screenshots:
- runs on:
- Windows 10 32/64 bit
Windows 2008
Windows 2003
Windows 8 32/64 bit
Windows 7 32/64 bit
Windows Vista 32/64 bit
Windows XP - file size:
- 678 KB
- main category:
- Internet
- developer:
- visit homepage
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