Everyone
is aware at this point that we are being tracked online. Every day, every
minute, every second. What we do not have much information on, is the breadth and
depth of how much information is being tracked. Try
Lightbeam. It allows the users to find out who they are connecting to in real time. It basically generates a record of
every site one has visited and the third party sites that track each
person using cookies.
I recently tried Lightbeam and browsed the web
for 20 minutes and I was awestruck by the result I saw.
Below is a screenshot of my result:
After I visited a website, the add-on created a real time
visualization of all the third parties that are active on that page. As I
browsed to a second site, the add-on highlighted the third parties that are
also active there and showed which third parties have seen me at both sites.
In total I visited 9 sites and I was connected to 68 third party sites! That is pretty hectic.
What else did I discover? As I moved to the list view, I was able to view the exact names of each third party website and below is a screen shot of that:
Some websites here were simply analytic websites like google-analytics.com and googletagmanager.com. There were also other websites listed here, like Googleleadservices.com. After doing some research, I
realized this website is actually "A vicious browser hijacker that pretends to be a legit search
provider like Chrome, Yahoo and Bing. It is installed onto your computer when you
visit some unauthorized webpages or open spam email attachments”.
There were even some websites that were tracking exactly which ads were being displayed on my screen, which links I was clicking and even where I was hovering my mouse.
All in all, it was indeed a very informational experiment and I am very glad that I did it. I suggest every one to try Lightbeam for yourself, find who is tracking you, how you are getting tracked online and take necessary steps to prevent it.
