Picture this. You decide to go for a short walk around the neighbourhood, pick up some bread at your regular corner store, buy a strip of Crocin from the pharmacy, enjoy a cup of coffee at the local cafe and head back home after an hour. You’ve visited a total of three places and bought three items. Now imagine if a stranger had stalked your every move, made a note of every place you visited, each item you bought and analysed your behaviour.

Worrying, right? Even more worrying, however, is the fact that all of us are exposed to a similar form of covert surveillance each time we visit a website. We have hundreds of unidentified eyes watching us through third party websites. Thanks to Lightbeam, Mozilla’s new add-on for the Firefox browser, we can now see a visual mapping of the data tracking being carried out on us.

At 8:30am today, I chose to install Lightbeam. I then opened 7 websites which included Youtube, Guardian, Twitter, Reddit and Google News. At 8:46am, Lightbeam showed me that there were 81 third party sites that had tracked me in a space of 15 minutes.

The interactive visualisation above is the graph view of who is tracking your online movements and it grows as you visit different websites. The sites I had visited myself are round in shape, while the third party websites are represented by triangles. You can also view the same data in the form of a clock which looks at the connections over a 24-hour period as well as the List view which lets you examine each website individually.

Clock View

List View

The lack of transparency and the rather complex and covert functioning of the third party websites is a major cause for concern as it violates any user’s privacy.

It’s simple – we need more information on what’s going on in the back-alleys of the worldwide web.

Information is the currency of the online world and there are many companies out there who constantly need more information on you and me as they look to trade this currency for real money. In most cases, third party websites track the user’s activity and gather enough data and information to direct targeted advertising at them but in other cases, websites are known to sell information to the highest bidder.

Tracking websites can be broadly classified into three categories – advertising, social and analytics. Ads hosted on websites that a user visits may be placed by third party servers in the form of banners and links. Cookies – small files containing information for the website’s use – are deployed onto a user’s system enabling the advertiser to pull information at a later stage to target specific ads at this user. Third party websites use social plug-ins like facebook and Twitter on different websites to track user’s “likes” and “tweets” and other personal information on social media. Websites that deal with analytics primarily track usage data, frequency of visits on a particular site and a pattern of behaviour. Once all three elements are combined, it’s clear that the only thing transparent is us, the users.

In a worldwide web where users are exposed and becoming increasingly naked, the companies that are voyeuristically tracking our every move seem to be shrouded in more layers than required. Mozilla’s Lightbeam is a bold step in highlighting the importance of privacy and increasing transparency. We share so much information – knowingly and unknowingly – online every day, and Lightbeam definitely helps us get some information on who and what has access to this information.

Keeping in line with their mission “to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web”, Mozilla’s ultimate aim for Lightbeam is to gather enough crowd-sourced data to create the first global map of the connections between first party and third party websites. Each user can choose to contribute their own data by opting to do so when they run Lightbeam. The power of this tool is very much in the hands of the users as Mozilla has also posted the code to Lightbeam so users can contribute their ideas and tinker with it to make it even better and help the internet community as a whole.

It’s always welcome when a browser offers its users the ability to protect their online movements and identity. The best thing to do to keep an eye on who is tracking you and also to contribute to the global tracking map is download Lightbeam for Firefox. Once in a while there comes a silver lining to the grey underbelly of the Internet, and this is it.