Mozilla, and the non-profit Mozilla Foundation established to promote the openness of the world wide web, understandably has a keen interest in how the web works.
At the Mozfest conference and festival, the Mozilla Foundation announced the release of Lightbeam, a tool for the Firefox browser which reveals, simply and rather beautifully, the third-party sites and tracking functions that touch and track us as we move through our online lives.
Lightbeam began life as Collusion, a Mozilla project by developer Atul Varma. It entered the public view in a TED talk by the Mozilla Foundation's then-CEO, Gary Kovacs, in which he demonstrated just how many sites, tracking cookies and other information-gathering elements were attached to the web pages people view.
Lightbeam is the public release of this technology. Available as an add-on for the Firefox browser, Mozilla's core product and chief money-earner, it collates and graphically represents the ways the web interacts with you as you interact with the web.
4 web sites visited, 120 web sites visit you
I contacted Mark Surman, Chief Executive of the Mozilla Foundation and Alex Fowler, Global Privacy and Public Policy leader, by email and asked them about this new tracker-tracking tool.
Forbes: In layman's term, how does Lightbeam work?
Alex Fowler: After you download and install the Lightbeam add-on to Firefox, it creates a real-time visualization of the websites a user visits and all the third parties that are also active on those sites. As the user browses from site to site, the visualization grows and highlights third parties which track you across the Web. The add-on provides additional visualizations, filters and controls for the user to further explore and shape these interactions. In this way,Lightbeam educates users about what how the web works, shining a light on interactions that take place outside a user's general awareness.
Forbes: Tracking Internet behavior is an increasingly common pursuit among marketeers, social networks and indeed government agencies. What are the kind of behaviors you are hoping to shed light on, discourage or empower people to prevent with Lightbeam?
Fowler: Lightbeam aims to educate users and empower people with information on site-to-site connections that can potentially be used to track web users. Because it operates within the browser, there is no ability to monitor tracking that goes on behind the scenes, like advertisers that monitor data from server to server or government subpoenas.
Not all tracking is bad. Many services rely on user data to provide relevant content and enhance your online experience. But tracking can happen without the user’s knowledge. That’s not okay for some. It should be the user who decides when, how and if they want their browsing data to be shared. We recognize the importance of transparency and the need to educate users --- and our mission is all about empowering users, both with tools and information.
Forbes: How does this fit in with the broader mission and goals of the Mozilla Foundation?
Mark Surman: Mozilla's mission is to make sure users are informed and educated, and to keep the web open. Lightbeam is primarily an educational tool about privacy, which is a fundamental element of an open web. Lightbeam further advances Mozilla's mission by offering the option to share data to create a big picture view of data connections on the web. This crowd-sourced data will allow us to build better versions of Firefox and help with policy work. Any attempt to alter privacy on the web must be a combination of education, technology and policy, and Lightbeam approaches the issue from all three angles.
Hope for better rays
The most common element in the construction of the Internet - narrowly edging out fiber optic cable, cat gifs and obliging couples - is irony, and there is more than a trace element in the creation of a device of this kind by Mozilla, which is to a very great extent funded by payment from
What the Mozilla Foundation is doing with Lightbeam ties into what Tunnelbear is doing with its social button and data tracker filtration system, and what disconnect.me (which created a Chrome fork for Collusion) and ghostery, among others, are doing with their own plug-ins. These monetization efforts, on the one hand, are a considerable part of the financial logic of the current web. On the other, measures such as Lightbeam are used by a small minority of the web's users. Unless change come from the top, a fairly small number of cognoscenti will arm themselves with this knowledge, while the mechanisms of data tracking will continue to apply to the vast majority of web users.
For the curious, Lightbeam is an immediately accessible and diverting way to visualize the connections of the web - and when it comes to the information age, an informed perspective on where that information might be going has very little downside.
If readers have recommendations on covering their virtual tracks, or feel the exercise is futile, I'd be interested to hear them.
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