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Mozilla Lightbeam For Firefox: NSA Spying Row Leads Firm to Expose Who’s Watching While You Surf
The new Lightbeam software from Mozilla, the team behind the Firefox browser, claims to be a watershed moment in the battle for web transparency
by Adam Sherwin – 24 OCTOBER 2013 / Belfast Telegraph
Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers to discover what your interests are.
Users who activate Lightbeam will be able to see a real-time visualisation of every site they visit and every third-party that is active on those sites, including commercial organisations which might potentially be sharing your data.
Mozilla wants users who install the Lightbeam add-on to Firefox, to crowd-source their data, to produce the first “big picture” view of web tracking, revealing which third-parties are most active.
Lightbeam promises a “Wizard of Oz” moment for the web, “where users collectively provide a way to pull back the curtains to see its inner workings,” Mozilla claimed.
Mark Surman, Mozilla’s executive director, said: “It’s a stake in the ground in terms of letting people know the ways they are being tracked. At Mozilla, we believe everyone should be in control of their user data and privacy and we want people to make informed decisions about their Web experience.”
Mozilla already offers users the ability to disable “cookies” – small files that download from websites onto a computer, allowing advertisers to target users based on their online activity – an option taken up by 18 per cent of UK Firefox users.
continue at Belfast Telegraph:
h/t: Susan Duclos
The add-on “Ghostery” is excellent for all browsers. It shows all trackers and other spyware on any given page, and blocks them as well.
http://www.ghostery.com/
My plug is a way of paying them back for this excellent add-on.
Yeah, Ghostery is an excellent plugin. For example, on this page there are 5 trackers, AdShuffle, ChartBeat, Google Analytics, NewsMax, and OpenX. 2 are analytic software, 2 are advertising software, and one’s a widget. All are blocked. I installed the precursor to Lightbeam yesterday and it didn’t seem as seamlessly integrated to the browser. I’d be impressed if it did anything more than Ghostery.