Adventures with Lightbeam
This week I experimented with a browser add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox called Lightbeam. Lightbeam is a service that tracks what first-party websites you visit (such as Twitter or CBC) and what third party sites are attached to them. Using this data it creates an interactive visualization of the relationships between these sites.
The first thing about Lightbeam that I wasn’t a fan of was that it was only for Firefox, and as an avid Chrome user I was less than please to have to download an inferior browser. But this post is not about my distaste for Firefox it is about my experience with Lightbeam. So let’s stick to that.
Lightbeam on it’s on, at least to me isn’t that amazing. I understand it shows you that when you visit a site it’s not just that site that your connected to. It could be one other site or even twenty that you’ve never heard of. Acting as a way to show you how little control we have over this and where our data is potentially being sent to.
Now to me (or even the average person) I don’t really take all this too seriously, using Lightbeam and seeing all the third party sites connected to me isn’t going to change the way I surf the web. However if I were to see what information or date these sites are taking and how they are being used, well, that’s a whole different story.
I would recommend giving it a try (if you already have Firefox installed), but unless you really worry about this information and want to avoid anyone getting your data, this add-on isn’t too fantastic.
Just my two cents.
TM
Here’s my graph from the twenty or so minutes I browsed the web