Mozilla Add-on Lets You See Who's Watching
Mozilla announced an interesting browser add-on called Collusion at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. This experimental add-on allows you to see all of the websites that are tracking you while you surf the Internet. I had the opportunity to test it, and I discovered that 99 percent of websites track their users using third-party websites. I recommend that everyone install the add-on to see who is tracking them across the Web. This add-on comes just as Google's new privacy policy takes effect. The privacy policy permits Google to obtain data from Android phones, YouTube, Gmail, and Web browsing, which it will use to more accurately target advertising to individual Web users. A coalition of 50 consumer groups in the European Union and the U.S. sent an email to Larry Page protesting the policy, which is thought to be an invasion of privacy and to violate some laws both in the U.S. and the EU. Unfortunately, the add-on can't keep websites from tracking you. The developers claim that the full version, when available, will allow you to opt-in to share your anonymous data with a global web-tracking database (to help researchers, journalists, and others analyze and explain how data is tracked on the web). Personally, I don't like this option either.