Firefox and Lightbeam

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Have any of you played around with the new Firefox extension called Lightbeam (made by Mozilla)? It shows you which 3rd party sites are getting your information and/or tracking you when you surf around the web. It’s pretty entertaining to see which of your favorite sites are selling you out.

I bounced around to a few popular/common sites… biggest offenders that I’ve come across so far are huffingtonpost.com and foxnews.com.

Pretty entertaining! I don’t use Firefox as my usual browser, so I probably won’t continue this little experiment for long.

Here’s an article about Lightbeam:

You can install it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/

2

I installed it, but maybe I’m too new to Firefox, how do I actually use it? I didn’t see any mention on the add-in page that details how to actually GET to the visual graph. Is it supposed to be automatically popping up or something?

3

Is your add-on bar turned on? (ctrl-/) You should see the Lightbeam icon on the bottom right corner of your web browser.

What a great add-on. I tried it with Disconnect (an add-on that blocks many of these trackers) turned off and turned on, and what a difference.

4

I hate that shit, so I use DoNotTrackMe. Also available on Chrome.

5

‘Ghostery’ and ‘Better Privacy’ are also a handy extensions (FF) for this stuff.