Who's tracking you online? Find out with Mozilla's Collusion

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/

You are leaving digital footprints online. Those footprints are increasingly valuable to advertisers and marketers. How is your data -- sites you're visiting, what you're reading online -- being used, for good and bad?

Mozilla's Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers.

Download the add-on here:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/

Full interview is here:
http://ww3.tvo.org/video/174232/big-bad-data
http://theagenda.tvo.org/episode/174104/my-digital-footprint

I want you, Mark, first of all to tell us:

What Mozilla is, and then I want you to voice over something.

What is Mozilla?

Well, Mozilla is a global non-profit that does amount of other things, is firefox.

Why we do it is we see the internet as an important public asset.

The really, we all own an awesome share.

So, we do things really to make sure that, Uh... continues to be the case,

one of those thing is helping people protect their privacy online.

And one of the things that you got now is something called "Collusion" .

- Indeed
- It's a browser

Well no, Collusion is not a browser... so, it's a things that you can do in most browsers called "add-on".

- It's add-on of Firefox
- Add-on of Firefox, and really what it does is helping you understand...

which is the really key piece of is...

What's been tracked about you. So you can see it on the screen right now.

When you turn... turn the Collusion add-on on the Firefox, you can see what's being tracked about you as you move through the web.

So, here what you are seeing is the number of sites you are viewing, Uh... I can't read them because they're away up there on the screen

but the ones are blue are sites that you actually visited

What's interesting to see is as you move around, you start to see there are bunch are grey.

Those are the sites you didn't actually visit

but they had embed on the page you visited, or something else, a Facebook like button...

They're collecting information as you move, under the surface about you, uh...

Often for very good reason, because they're trying to serve you the ads there wanna target to you, uh...

Or the, you know, tried to provide features that are better for you

but there are lots of sites you never heard about.

Like DoubleClick, maybe you've heard about it. It's a big name at online advertising.

But many other small ones you're seeing there... you haven't heard about.

They're all collecting information, passing the breadcrumbs, as you move through the internet and browse.

- The numbers of the circles on that page there suggested the tentacles go very far and have very many
- Absolutely

And interconnected, so as I move from New York Times or in that case to Google mail to have a post on TSN.

You know, some of the trackers like DoubleClick.

They are watching my patterns across all of the sites.

And that is what creates the big data opportunity.

But there is also a question, I am not choosing to opt-in to provide that information.

Do I want the information out there?

Anyway one of the especially, when some of these organizations may sell the data away.

They allow people when they aggregate it all together into a big data to profile me.