One Week of Allowing Anyone to Track Me Online
Over the last week, I’ve deliberately let anyone track me online.
Normally, I’m a little paranoid about my privacy and use the Ghostery and Adblock Plus extensions with my browser.
However, I saw that Mozilla had launched Lightbeam, which they claim is an easy way to see exactly which sites are tracking you.
So, I decided to give Lightbeam a try. I used Firefox as my default browser and turned off any features that might stop people from tracking me.
Here’s what I found after a week of unrestrained tracking …
Getting started with Lightbeam
Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on. It creates a record of every site that you’ve visited and ever site that is able to add track you with cookies.
The Lightbeam site has a quick explanation of how it works:
You can grab a copy of Lightbeam from the Firefox add-ons area.
The Lightbeam add-on will visualize all of the sites you’ve connected with. You can see the results in your browser and you can also choose to share the results with Mozilla.
You can access the Lightbeam results by clicking Tools > Lightbeam in the Firefox menu.
So who was tracking me?
After a week of browsing with the Lightbeam add-on, I could see a list of all the sites that had been tracking me.
In the image below, I’ve eliminated the sites that I visited directly and only included the Third Party sites that I did not visit.
Here’s a list of those sites, together with the company that owns the site:
- Google: Google-analytics.com
- Google: Doubleclick.net
- Edgecast: Net-mine.com
- Yahoo: Yieldmanager.com
- Google: Ajax.googleapis.com
- comScore: Scorecardresearch.com
- eXelate Media: Exelator.com
- AppNexus: Adnxs.com
- Media Innovation Group: Mookie1.com
- Demdex: Demdex.net
- Google: Fonts.googleapis.com
- Automattic: Gravatar.com
- Specific Media: SpecificClick.net
- Google: Googleadservices.com
- Google: GoogleSyndication.com
- Quantcast: Quantserve.com
- Lotame: Crwdcntrl.net
- Facebook: Facebook.net
- Tribal Fusion: Tribalfusion.com
- DirectREV: Directrev.com
So who was tracking me online? The simple answer was: Google and some other companies.
Here I’ve totalled up the connections across different companies:
- Google: 207
- Edgecast: 30
- Yahoo: 26
In short, Google had over 6 as many connections to me as the rest of the web put together.
Here is Lightbeam’s visual representation of the sites I was connected to. You can see the enormous G in the center of the image.
These results are probably a little abnormal. For example, I’m am an unusually heavy user of Google services, and am unusually light user of Facebook.
However, my results really aren’t that different from the norm. The Guardian partnered with Mozilla to visualize Lightbeam data and the chart below shows their results.
Google had the largest tracking site with Doubleclick, plus another entry in the top 10. The Guardian didn’t break down the exact numbers, but using a visual estimate, the results show that Google’s circles are at least twice as large as the second place site: Quantcast.
Conclusion
How to find out more
Many of the domain names used to track us are obscure. I had to do some searching to find out more about the likes of net-mine.com and scorecardresearch.com
There doesn’t appear to be a single, central database of tracking sites.
Cookiecert.com provided the only searchable database. Sites like Abine.com, Donottrackplus.com and even theguardian.com do provide detail on tracking sites, but you have to use a search engine (like Google) to find their results.
Finally, it’s worth noting that cookies are just one of many more ways that you can be tracked. Google and others are using alternative methods and coming up with better solutions,
Maybe I am too lackadaisical, but I do not mind being tracked by google. About a year ago I decided I wanted a new computer. I was not in a hurry so decided to google for good prices. I couldn’t find anything I liked on sale, so decided I would google every couple of days until I find something suitable at the right price. But I noticed that every time there was a sale on an all in one PC, google would let me know in an ad. About 6 weeks later I bought an all in one with the features I wanted for the price I wanted. This was thanks to being tracked.
No, that’s a valid point Brian.
There’s also the notion of keeping many of these sites in business.
I’ll honestly admit that I may be hypocritical here … we have a whole other business that runs on Adsense revenue.
Adsense etc is a biggy. There is so much good information on the internet, particularly in blogs. Many people pay for thier blog with adveritising. If do not track was a default setting for many visitors, then site revenue may drop and some great bloggers may give up and keep their knowledge to themselves.
Striking a happy balance is always difficult, especially in a fast changing medium like the internet.
I am a little bias as am building a site that will include affiliate links. While I will not write about the affiliate products I will put affiliate banners on my pages.
True unfortunately using AdBlock and Ghostery doesn’t easily scale with the current state of the web.
If everyone did it, we’d break a lot of the current web.
Steve…thank you for these extra activity blog post. They are the most fun to read and at the same time educational or informative.
I leaned towards a slight obsessive privacy browsing as a principle. I belong to none of the social networks either. Nearly 18 of 22 of my domains use HTTPS.
Here is Internet Archives reason for HTTPS in is blog post a few weeks ago.
“Now HTTPS by default…. For several years, the Internet Archive has tried to
avoid keeping Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of our readers. Web servers and other software that interacts with web users record IP addresses in their logs by default which leaves a record that makes it possible to reconstruct who looked at what.
Thanks treat2day!
We’ve been throwing around the idea of running the whole of OSTraining behind an SSL.
What’s your experience been like with running your sites behind an SSL?