

Mozilla Lightbeam – Relationships between third parties and the sites you visit - casca
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/

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yk
Looks interesting, just to take it for a quick spin I tested it with a small
set of bookmarks. [1] Then I deactivated noScript and Disconnect and
reactivated them individually. (Screenshots at
[http://imgur.com/a/fRrnp](http://imgur.com/a/fRrnp) ).

So the result is, that there are three sites which do not incorporate third
party connections whatsoever (DDG, HN, fefe). Without the addons, the other
sites form a connected graph. With disconnect, the graph is less strongly
connected. With only noScript, it starts to fall apart. With both activated,
the primary sites are disconnected. ( But the combination apparently breaks
something, since a second Guardian primary node appears.)

A few caveats, first of all this is of course not reproducible, since it
depends on my whitelists for noScript and Disconnect. And the test set is of
course not representative for anything except itself. And absence of a edge in
the graph does not mean absence of a connection. But with this in mind, I
found it quite interesting how connected even a small test set is.

[1] guardian.co.uk zeit.de blog.fefe.de reddit.com
[http://natmonitor.com/2013/10/24/ghostly-shape-of-coldest-
pl...](http://natmonitor.com/2013/10/24/ghostly-shape-of-coldest-place-in-the-
universe-revealed/) ( from reddit) duckduckgo.com
[http://linuxreviews.org/kde/screenshot_in_kde/](http://linuxreviews.org/kde/screenshot_in_kde/)
(from DDG search)

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sp332
This looks like a cool upgrade to Mozilla's Collusion add-on, which is no
longer available. [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/collusion/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/) Edit: It even gave me
a pop-up warning me that it's overwriting my Collusion data.

~~~
r0h1n
Lightbeam _is_ the new Collusion

 _> Lightbeam began in July 2011 as Collusion, a personal project by Mozilla
software developer Atul Varma. Inspired by the book The Filter Bubble, Atul
created an experimental add-on to visualize browsing behavior and data
collection on the Web.

> In September 2012, Mozilla joined forces with students at Emily Carr
> University of Art + Design to develop and implement visualizations for the
> add-on. With the support of the Ford Foundation and the Natural Sciences and
> Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Collusion has been re-imagined as
> Lightbeam and was launched in the fall of 2013._

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casca
Interesting that they use the list of trackers from TrackerBlock[1]. The
license provided is:

    
    
        We reserve our copyright as to commercial applications but please contact us if you are interested in licensing for non-profit or educational uses.
    
        Our source code is available to review for your assurance.
    

In their extension, the "trackers.json" file is dated as 8/Feb/2012, so almost
2 years old now.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/trackerblock/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/trackerblock/)

~~~
GhotiFish
... why was this downvoted?

------
ozten
[https://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam](https://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam)

------
Udo
What I would really like is a plugin that defaults the browser to incognito /
private mode when using certain sites. For example, automatically search
google.com as if I'm _not_ logged into Gmail.

------
ciupicri
I have:

    
    
        network.http.sendRefererHeader;0
        network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer;false
    

and Lightbeam doesn't show anything until I reset them. Though I have a
feeling that I'm still being tracked.

~~~
taf2
Yeah you do still get tracked but you really screw up any sort of referrer
tracking - you'll appear to be coming directly to every page you visit. Also
in some cases you may be blocked because you may look like a bad crawler...

~~~
ciupicri
It happened to me with
[http://blog.bodhizazen.net/](http://blog.bodhizazen.net/) because of some
stupid anti-spam Wordpress plugin.

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buster
So it's like a fancy display of adblock/ghostery (who tracks me on which site)
with a correlation of the sites i already visited... ok.. i'm sticking to just
some adblocker :)

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r0h1n
I'm curious - after the first few "wow, nice visualization!", how does this
add-on improve the experience of someone already running add-ons like
Disconnect or Ghostery?

~~~
sp332
Well, you could make sure they're working? Or double-check that none of your
whitelisted sites are doing anything too suspicious. Or maybe just for
gloating :)

~~~
hnha
It does not seem to monitor actual requests but only references. I block a lot
of domains but they still appeared in this add-on.

~~~
sp332
How are you blocking them? Sites blocked by RequestPolicy and Ghostery don't
show up.

~~~
hnha
In my router! I guess it returns a.status that the tool interprets successful
connection.

~~~
sp332
It probably counts when the request is made, without waiting for a connection
to be successful.

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cpeterso
Is this part of the Cookie Clearinghouse project? I wish there was more
information about the crowdsourcing data collection. What data is collected
and how will it be used?

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hrjet
As a way to demonstrate to a lay user the insidious relationships on the web,
it is pretty cool.

However, this doesn't seem like a good way to collect good quality crowd-
sourced data. It can be easily poisoned, and there are simpler alternatives,
such as crawling and analyzing the links by themselves. (I am assuming that an
entity like Mozilla would have sufficient resources for that).

~~~
davidascher
Crawling is certainly a complementary data collection strategy, but it's
harder to avoid IP-based "filter bubble" effects w/out also deploying
something akin to a bot. The hope is that by using real people using real
browsers we'll collect data that reflects actual-behavior-in-the-wild.

You're right that poisoning is a potential problem if/when the data ends up
useful enough to warrant poisoning.

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shmerl
Ah, I thought it's some new add-on. It used to be called Collusion.

