Mozilla's Big Plans for Tracking Who Tracks You Online

For the most part, the ad networks and analytics companies and other online trackers that watch as you plod across the Internet are silent sentinels. Sure, they get debated on Capitol Hill and in magazine articles, but it’s pretty easy to forget about them. They’re distant, abstract, like the Greek debt crisis or loose nukes in Russia. We know we should care, but who has the time?

A new add-on from Mozilla makes them a whole lot more tangible. The tool, ominously called Collusion, is a free download for users of the Firefox browser. When you have it on, every time you visit a Web page, it records all the third-party trackers that glom onto you. There’s no great technical wizardry involved—anyone who knows how to navigate the developer settings on her browser can see the same data—but Collusion visualizes the information in a simple, alluring schematic. It’s a spider web of all the services that snare you online.

News: BusinessWeek