This morning, I checked 4 web sites as I do every day
I look at my surfing conditions in the area, I check local news,
a look at national news, and I looked a little bit of the tech website that I go to every day
by the time I finish my cup of cofe
I actually interacted with over a hundred and twenty different companies
I checked 4 web sites, 120 companies.
Very few people understand that,
very few people recognize that the interactions they have online
are far more expansive than just the web sites that they think they're visiting each day.
And so we built Lightbeam to help each one of us understand
what tracking is occurring, and what kind of information we're sending out
in our daily lives
it's a Firefox add-on that provides users a view
into all of their online interactions.
Lightbeam is part of a much larger mission.
We build Firefox for the same reason,
so that when you use Firefox,
you have a base level of protection,
a base level of flexibility,
and a base level of figuring out what's going on
and making some changes if you should want to.
Not only do you have the content that the publisher is making available,
but now you have like buttons and tweet this.
Each one of those elements that the page is loaded for you
is being provided by a different company,
and so in that one moment that you see that website
all those other companies are also seeing YOU at that site.
We see Lightbeam as both a teaching tool
for the people who use it,
and also a learning tool for all of us.
When we take back that curtain,
and we expose kinds of all the interactions that users have.
It's not necessarily good or bad,
I think the bad that we're focusing on here
is the lack of awareness, the lack of understanding.
The first step in any of these types of issues
is understanding all those different companies you're interacting with.
It really is a Wizard of Oz moment to kind of see
that behind-the-scenes true functioning of how the web operates.