OPINION14 March 2012

Who’s watching you?

Companies that track your online behaviour tend to like to do it quietly in the background. But it just got a little bit easier for web users to see what’s going on.

Companies that track your online behaviour tend to like to do it quietly in the background. But it just got a little bit easier for web users to see what’s going on.

Mozilla has introduced an “experimental” add-on for its web browser, Firefox, which visualises how users’ data is being tracked and shared by advertisers as they navigate the web.

The free Collusion add-on for the open-source browser draws a network of blobs representing websites, with arrows between them showing who is ‘colluding’ with who by sharing cookies containing data about you. It’s quite an eye opener.

After a few minutes tapping in the addresses of some websites, I have a map of about 30 nodes, less than half of which are sites I recognise.

The sites that appear to be most generous with my data are spoof news site theonion.com, real news site huffingtonpost.com and baby animals site zooborns.com. Read into that what you will. Quantserve.com and scorecardresearch.com and imrworldwide.com are among the biggest beneficiaries.

That’s Quantcast, ComScore and Nielsen respectively.

Past efforts to allow people to understand and control how they are being tracked have been rather half-hearted, requiring web users to jump through numerous hoops and offering opt-outs that only applied to certain companies, or that expired whenever users cleared their cookies.

The online industry has argued that this is how the web works, and that they wouldn’t be able to offer us all the great services and ad-supported content that we enjoy for free without knowing things about us. But critics say that web users never signed up to share their data with all and sundry and it doesn’t have to be this way.

Recently the ad industry backed down a little with the latest move by the Digital Advertising Alliance. It aims to create a browser-based opt out that all its members would adhere to. But even this has been criticised for providing loopholes that would allow tracking for ‘market research’ and ‘product development’ purposes.

Tools like Collusion, which make it easier and more fun to see who is tracking you, will help ensure the consumer’s voice is heard in this debate.

@RESEARCH LIVE

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