LONG BEACH, Calif. — Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs took the TED stage Tuesday morning to introduce Collusion, a Firefox browser add-on that lets you track who’s tracking you across the web for behavioral targeting purposes.
Describing the medium as “an area of consumer protection that’s almost entirely naked,” Kovacs argued that the price we’re now being asked to pay for connectivenss is our privacy, and in turn, it’s “now time for us to watch the watchers.”
Collusion looks to offer more transparency to users by creating a visualization of how your data is being spread to different companies as you navigate the web. Each time it detects data being sent to a behavioral tracker, it creates a red (advertisers), grey (websites) or blue dot on the visualization and shows the links between the sites you visit and the trackers they work with.
Mozilla has created an online demo to show just how quickly your data ends up in the hands of dozens of different companies as you move from popular sites like IMDB, The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Citing some personal examples, Kovacs said that by the time his daughter had visited four sites over breakfast, she was being tracked by 25 different places. And in the course of a day, he says, he found himself being tracked by 150.
While the visualization does an effective job of showing just how quickly your data ends up in places far and wide without your knowledge and the interconnections between various services, Collusion also features the ability to turn off such tracking.
It may seem that Mozilla is on a crusade against the current trend of personalization, but Kovacs emphasized that Collusion is about alerting users to tracking that’s happening without their consent. It’s not about creating an alarmist attitude toward services that people opt-in to that provide recommendations based on your shopping history, for example.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
The Internet is a black hole of procrastination. It’s a rare occasion when we open up our web browsers and just do work without checking Facebook or getting sucked into YouTube.
Not only is it possible to get work done, but your web browser can actually help you be more productive. If you use Mozilla’s Firefox, you’re in even more luck since we’ve compiled this list of five Firefox add-ons to boost your work flow efficiency.
Take a look and let us know which add-ons you use to stay productive.
If you use Firefox, you’ve learned to love tabs, but it’s far too easy to get over-zealous and end up with an unrecognizable clutter up there. Tab Mix Plus will help you wrangle your tabs including sorting options, the ability to undo closed tabs and it even come with a session manager to help you multitask like a pro. Besides, more than one million users can’t be wrong.
Print Edit is one heck of a hack if you know how to use it. The main purpose of the add-on is to help you format any webpage for printing. From the edit mode, you can add and remove elements from a page — like, say, banner ads or search bars — for a cleaner printed page. The add-on, however, can also give you detailed information on the make up of a website. “Inspecting” individual elements will bring up their properties in CSS. For example, did you know that the width on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google is 102px wide, in bold font with a background color of #f8f8f8?
It’s a fun and quick hack for discovering how elements on a site are created.
Keep forgetting birthdays? Meetings? What you need to do next Thursday? ReminderFox is a simple add-on that acts like a digital to-do list and calendar permanently attached to your browser. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that could save you from missing that important business appointment.
If you’ve shopped online for anything recently, you know that prices can vary drastically between websites. An espresso machine on Amazon could be $50 cheaper on eBay. PriceBlink aims to streamline your comparison shopping by automatically searching for the same product across dozens of sites and alerting you when it’s available somewhere else for cheaper. The add-on also has alerts for coupons and deals on any website you visit to help you get the most bang for your buck whether you need to buy a last-minute gift or supplies for your office.
If your “work” also means staying up to date with your social profile, than Yoono is a good in-browser option, especially if you want to stay connected without leaving Hootsuite or Tweetdeck open all day. Yoono syncs up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, chat services and more with a discrete little vertical and/or horizontal bar. The add-on will scroll updates from your connected networks and allows you to publish and post text, image and video at the same time.
Mozilla has extended its search partnership with Google for at least three additional years, the company has announced.
Under the terms of the agreement, Google will continue to be the default search provider for Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Google Search deal has been a key source of income for Mozilla, generating 84% of Mozilla’s $121.1 million revenue in 2010.
The original deal between Mozilla and Google expired in November 2011, and in October Mozilla launched Firefox with Bing, sparking speculation that it might switch to Bing as its search provider.
The new multi-year arrangement with Google squashes such rumors and shows that the rivalry between Firefox and Google’s web browser Chrome wasn’t enough of a hurdle for the two companies to strike a deal again.
Curse Firefox. I’m getting to this much later tonight than I would have, thanks to a stinking Firefox 3.6 rendering bug, plus Firefox’s refusal to make it easy to work around Firefox rendering bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer makes that easy with conditional comments. Firefox has no such feature, pretending it’s always right. Which is fine, except when Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 render the same page differently, and 3.6 does so wrongly.
Anyway. It’s still hard to argue against Free State Foundation and others who want to roll back the FCC wholesale when the FCC simply can’t tell the truth. Eight billion dollars of stimulus money went into broadband Internet in 2009. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, consider that the industry spends seventeen billion a year on it lately. This is a thriving, competitive market rushing to get better, faster, to keep and attract ever more customers.
And yet, the FCC’s claiming the market is failing. This is ridiculous and politically motivated. I discussed this on Friday but Seton Motley has more today on the lies in the Section 706 Report the FCC is mandated to put out every year. Two years in a row, just as wireless broadband is expanding the universe of competition like never before, the FCC is set to declare the market a failure. A letter grade of F. As Motley says, “the FCC is lying through it bureaucratic teeth.”
This is a ploy to prepare for a power grab. Watch your wallet, and your market.
Beware, California, Illinois, and any other state that looks to make its own power grab and try to tax interstate commerce, and specifically aiming at firms like Amazon. The market will punish you. Ask the businesses fleeing Illinois to friendlier climates like Wisconsin. Ask the businesses that will ditch California without hesitation when their basic business models, like Amazon Associates work, are put in jeopardy. George Will sums up the situation well I think, like so:
Federalism — which serves the ability of businesses to move to greener pastures — puts state and local politicians under pressure, but that is where they should be, lest they treat businesses as hostages that can be abused.
When Ireland cut corporate taxes to compete better with its European Union siblings, business thrived there, and the core of the sclerotic union squawked. That’s competition. We, the people, do better under it, despite (or even because of) government doing worse.
Readers may get the impression that I’m a squish on copyright, but it’s not so. I support copyright when it stays within its Constitutional limits. So I strongly oppose this concept of “orphaned” works being forced into the public domain just because some businesses find it inconvenient to find the owners of the works. If big business and big government get together to let the former steal copyrights from little, hard-to-find copyright owners, then we might as well abolish copyright. It will only exist for the few who can afford enough lawyers.
Forgive me if I’m not as engaging as usual tonight. Firefox robbed me of a good 20 minutes of time tonight. Firefox 3, what was supposed to be faster and better than ever, had taken up so much memory it was slowing my whole system, and then it took forever to restart. Of course, now they’re saying Firefox 4 will be better this time. Really. Forgive me if I’m not optimistic. As soon as NoScript or equivalent comes to Safari, I’m away from Mozilla forever.
The IPv4 Panic Button has been hit again. People are saying we’re out of addresses! But we’re actually not. We’ve just handed out many large blocks of addresses to regional authorities who then assign them to those who need them. Of course, if we actually did run out (and couldn’t fix the issue of a few large companies having obscene numbers of addresses, from the old days), I say we just strip pubic IP addresses from countries that firewall the Internet, including China, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. If you’re not on the public Internet, you don’t need public IP addresses.
Do you use a wireless Internet router or access point at home? Put a password on it or you are at risk. Don’t use the older WEP encryption either. Use something harder to break like WPA.
Britain wants global action against hackers and “cybersecurity” issues and international standards to prevent “cyberwar.” Considering the Internet is primarily commercial anyway, this can be a good thing. Of course the specter of global governance online gets some worried, especially when the Obama administration routinely uses “cybersecurity” as the camel’s nose, so we can always watch closely and be careful before we agree to anything.
Guess what? Remember how Net Neutrality wasn’t supposed to be about free stuff? Well Verizon is setting policy to deal with excessive burdens on its wireless network… and the left is shrieking about Net Neutrality. Note that Verizon’s throttling is not content-based or peer-based but purely based on usage. There’s no bias. Net Neutrality is only an issue if Net Neut is just code for socialism, like we said!
You know what happens when you let government take emergency powers over our communications network? Abuse, as happened in Egypt. Our system of government isn’t on the model of the benevolent dictator. If we wanted that we’d have a King, not a President. Someone explain this to Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, please. They just don’t get it.
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