I’ve been reading Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble and was fascinated by his description of how data collection companies operate. Independently of that, David Ascher suggested that I add a feature to the Hackasaurus goggles which helps learners understand how cookies and tracking works.
I actually didn’t know a lot about tracking myself, so I whipped up a Firefox add-on called Collusion to help me visualize it better. The results were a little unsettling.
I’ve put a demonstration up at collusion.toolness.org, which takes you through five popular websites and visualizes the data collection companies that track you across them. From there, you can download the add-on if you want to see the tracking visualization of your own browsing behavior evolve in real-time.
Special thanks to the Mozilla Add-on SDK team for making a great foundation to build on. This experiment also gave me a chance to play around with d3.js, which is a fantastic successor to Protovis. And thanks to PrivacyChoice for their excellent tracker list, which I’m sort of using without their permission. I hope that is okay.
I’m also not really a privacy expert, so I’m not sure if everything I say in the demonstration is completely true. If you find any inaccuracies, please let me know.
Finally, if you need the source code, it’s all at github.com/toolness/collusion. I’m particularly interested in seeing better visualizations than the force-directed graph I’m using, which regrettably requires a lot of user interaction to explore and understand.