Why “Do Not Track” Matters
February 29th, 2012
Step 1: install the Collusion plugin for Firefox.
Step 2: let it run for a while.
Step 3: look at all the red circles, which show sites that are known to be trackers. Betcha didn’t know all those sites were being sent information about you…
Step 4: turn on “Do Not Track“.
1: Go to the Collusion demo page ( http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/demo/ )
2: Read quote “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
3: Wonder who Mozilla is selling me to.
That quote only works for the mindset of commercial systems, Mozilla is an NPO.
@John Drinkwater.
That is a little naive.
Mozilla needs lots of money for stuff like hosting. In order to get that the sell you to google for example (Google pays for being the primary search engine used by Firefox)
Before a flame war starts: I’m not saying Mozilla or Google is good or bad.
Collusion’s useful, but cookies are just one way to do cross-site tracking. Any web-beacon delivers to your IP address, and can also use browser-fingerprinting to make a remote log of your surfing.
Take a peek at this WIRED article on Collusion, using Adblock Plus… it’s very important than browsers offer an opt-out to this unwanted bundling!
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/ted-mozilla-collusion/
There is a search engine called Duck Duck Go which claims not to track personal information. They’ve got a web site describing their approach here:
http://donttrack.us/
http://duckduckgo.com/
Incidentally (and anecdotally), I use it as my primary search engine and rarely need to look elsewhere.
That doesn’t address the larger tracking issue of course, but it’s one small step.