This week, I decided to check out the Firefox add-on called Lightbeam. Essentially, Lightbeam is an application for the Mozilla Firefox web browser allows the user to see any first and third party applications or websites that track them. This application is very informative because it allows you to see how the web is interacting with you. It also allows you to see where your data is going.
I decided to download Firefox after being a long-time Google Chrome user, and install the Lightbeam add-on. I browsed the web for around 20 minutes, going through the usual websites such as Twitter, Facebook, d2l, and other stuff like that. After those 20 minutes, I opened up the Lightbeam tab to show me what websites were tracking me. Lightbeam displayed an informative graph which detailed which paths my data were tracked.
Recently, Mozilla released a new add-on for Firefox called Lightbeam. The primary purpose of Lightbeam is to help people better understand how the web works and to shine a light on the realities.
As you can see, I visited 10 websites in the span of 20 minutes, and I got tracked by around 125 third-party websites. Wow, that’s pretty crazy. I got tracked by over 10 times the amount of actual first party websites that I visited. That’s pretty insane.
Firefox Lightbeam This is the web extension version of the Firefox Lightbeam add-on for visualizing HTTP requests between websites in real time. The Firefox Lightbeam extension by Mozilla is a key tool for Mozilla to educate the public about privacy. The rebranded extension is now called Lightbeam, and is compatible with Firefox 18 and newer. Lightbeam works by recording third-party HTTP requests in the pages visited with the browser, noting requests that match a list of web tracking services and advertisers. The list itself originally came from privacychoice.org.
Unexpectedly, the 2 websites that allowed the most third-party sites to track me were the Washington Post and the Toronto Star. I don’t know what they would be tracking me for exactly, but I think that the websites were either embedded in the first-party webpages or tracking me down to see what kind of news (and therefore interest), I was seeing at the time.
To be quite honest, I thought that Facebook would be the one to allow the most third-party websites to track me, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, the Toronto Star actually led my data to Facebook.
It reassured me that Reddit didn’t really lead my data anywhere but its own database. It makes me happy to know that not all of my data is being shared to other websites (for the time being).
Image source.
Lightbeam Software
However, this graph doesn’t really worry me as much as I think it should. Data sharing technology has advanced so much that I think that this is actually the norm. First-party websites allowing other pages to track you isn’t uncommon, and I think that most websites do it. If I look at the larger scale of things, it definitely does worry me. However, looking at this graph of where I spent my time for 20 minutes doesn’t have as much of an impact on me. I think that it’s because I already know that my data is going to be shared and tracked.
Lightbeam For Firefox
But in the end, what can I do about all of this? Realistically, not much. I wish I could protect my privacy and change settings and start working behind a proxy, but that’s so much work. As much as it sucks to know, I can’t do much about this. It’s simply too inconvenient and time-consuming to work on compared to the risks I face. I also feel as if this is most peoples’ mindset about this issue. However, it does feel good to be informed about this, and that’s why I’m glad that I downloaded Lightbeam.