Saturday, 23. June 2012

Track the trackers with Collusion


Even by using privacy add-ons and telling sites not to track you, tracking that builds behavior profiles is out of control. Collusion is an add-on that will help you visualize that tracking. It was introduced by Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, during a TED talk titled Tracking the Trackers. Here is an interview with Ryan Merkley, Chief Operating Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, about Collusion, being tracked online and privacy.

There are many flavors of privacy add-ons for different browsers, but to get the global tracking "big picture," if you haven't already then you really need to try out Collusion. The "interactive, real-time visualization of entities that track your behavior" when you are surfing says a lot. After the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) struck out at Microsoft for turning on Do Not Track (DNT) by default in IE10, I scoffed at DAA's statement about advertisers supporting and enforcing the "appropriate standards for collecting and using web viewing data" through "strong self-regulation." Try out Collusion and you'll see how laughable that statement seems to be. Here's the demo as well as the add-on for Firefox or for Chrome.

networkworld.com

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