Mozilla's Lightbeam tool will expose who is looking over your shoulder on the web

Independent UK | 10-25-2013 | Adam Sherwin

[Red Badger]

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/mozillas-lightbeam-tool-will-expose-who-is-looking-over-your-shoulder-on-the-web-8902269.html

[Silentgypsy]

Type in “lightbeam” in the add-on search section.

[Silentgypsy]

This is interesting. Although I don’t use Google as a search engine, four third-party Google symbols appeared when I went to Breitbart.

[Silentgypsy]

DATA GATHERED SINCE
Oct 25, 2013
YOU HAVE VISITED
4 SITEs
YOU HAVE CONNECTED WITH
26 THIRD PARTY SITEs

[pallis]

Thanks! The problem is that they don’t have it for Seamonkey yet. They’ll get around to it.

[Red Badger]

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his usefulness.” (ObaMarx).

[Man from Oz]

Silentgypsy,

I installed this but can’t seem to find it when I enter websites. How were you able to access this program?

Thanks in advance,

MFO

[Red Badger]

Seems like every time I use CCleaner or Glary Utilities to clean my registry there is a Google component there to remove. I remove it and it comes right back, no matter what.

The Google people are better than the NSA at getting info. Of course they are. They are not government workers..........

[TomGuy]

In Firefox, I run

DoNotTrackMe
https://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php

Disconnect.me
https://disconnect.me/

Ghostery
https://www.ghostery.com/

They each do similar blocking of tracking cookies, but they each seem to have unique features/blocking.

[lbryce]

I’m in the process of creating a comprehensive overview and
visual usage guide for Lightbeam that I will post in response to your query as soon as I am done. Please expect to have it posted within the next 20 minutes or so.

[Blennos]

Very informative and useful comment. Thank you.

[poobear]

:) Can you elaborate? Bottom line?

[Silentgypsy]

I think I went to View, then to the add-on toolbar to make it visible, then to the little triangle with smaller triangles thingy to click on it. Then you mess around with the formatting or whatever you call it. (Can you tell I’m not a techie lol?)

[lbryce]

Open the extensions folder and scroll down to Lightbeam 1.0.2, click
on 'more' to open up the information provided below about Lightbeam.

The next step is for you to activate the Lightbeam visual guide.
In the page immediately following the information, you will see
a black line in the center of the page.

Follow the black line in the center of the page, to the bottom right corner.
Notice the triangular icon as indicated by the red circle, blue arrow. If you see
the triangular icon that means Lightbeam is installed.Click the icon and the
Lightbeam Visual Map will appear. It's best to extend the page to full screen mode.

So, there you have it. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

[Travis T. OJustice]

Thank you! That should about cover it!

[rktman]

Could be rather, uh, revealing to those that haven’t disabled cookies and clear any that may sneak in when you close your browser. Funny, I don’t think I get any from FR. LOL! Only the shadow knows. Or at least it used to be only the shadow.

[Prospero]

It is Collusion, as you probably already discovered for yourself.

[zeugma]

Bottom line to me is that it’s a pretty cool plug in. Scary at the same time as well, if you let it run for about a month and look at all of the correlations that show up.

[lbryce]

Thank you very much for the links. Much obliged.

[for-q-clinton]

Not exactly what I was hoping for. I was wondering how they were going to expose the gov’t looking at your stuff.

What I want is something that tells me who all sees my data (like NSA snooping on the wire).

[zeugma]

What I want is something that tells me who all sees my data (like NSA snooping on the wire).

That's easy. They see all of it unless you take extraordinary measures to hide from them. You can only monitor what comes to/from your device, which is basically what this add-on does from within firefox. I think you might be a bit surprised at the information this tool generates.

Something that I think might be useful, would be software that would basically listen in promiscuous mode on your network connection(s) and keep track of to/from for every connection, both incoming and outgoing. Disk space is cheap, as is processing power to break this kind of logging down into something useful.

The downside of it, is such a local database would be very valuable to the snoopers. One stop shopping for all their data needs as it were. You'd have to really trust whoever made the tool to do this.