Mozilla Lightbeam Shows Who's Watching You Online

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By Samantha Murphy Kelly2013-10-25 15:16:42 UTC

In the spirit of online transparency, and for those paranoid about organizations watching your every move, a new tool from Mozilla lets you monitor who is following your digital footprint.

Lightbeam is a free extension available for download on Mozilla's Firefox browser that promises to "illuminate the inner workings of the web." It uncovers which third-party companies are watching your online activity — most likely brands and advertisers looking to share your data or directly target ads.

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"As a part of Lightbeam, we're creating a big-picture view of how tracking works on the Internet, and how third-party sites are connected to multiple other sites," Mozilla said in a statement.

The company aims to give web users control of their data and privacy by using interactive visualizations in the form of graphs, clocks and lists. Lightbeam users can sift through this collected data to see the sources of images and other information.

"The visualization grows with every site you visit and every request made from your browser," Mozilla said in the statement. "In addition to the graph view, you can also see your data in a clock view to examine connections over a 24-hour period or in a List view to drill down into individual sites."

To download the extension on your Firefox browser, click here.

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Image: Patrick Lux/Getty Images; Mozilla

Topics: Advertising, Apps and Software, cookies, do not track, Firefox, Marketing, mozilla, privacy, Tech