Sina Technology News, March 3rd morning Beijing Time, Mozilla recently launched a new plugin for the Firefox browser called Collusion. When this plugin is enabled, it records any website that tracks user activity.
Recently, the practice of ad networks and internet analytics companies tracking user behavior has sparked intense controversy, and the launch of Collusion will help users address this issue. Collusion is a free downloadable Firefox browser plugin that records instances where websites track user activities and presents this information to users in a visual and concise manner.
For example, when a user visits The Huffington Post website, multiple third-party sites track user activities, including ad networks like DoubleClick and social media companies such as Facebook. If a user visits other sites and uses services from the same third-party sites, this tracking continues. Collusion displays these tracking relationships in a chart format.
According to the information displayed by Collusion, the longer users spend online, the more complex these tracking relationships become. For instance, after visiting 31 different sites, user information has been tracked by 79 third-party sites.
Ryan Merkley, the Chief Operating Officer of the Mozilla Foundation, stated that the current version of Collusion is just "experimental," and Mozilla plans to continue developing this plugin. They have already received $300,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation. He said: "We want to provide more functions to help people understand what trackers are doing, where they come from, and how they are interconnected." Collusion will also help users share this data anonymously so that academia and journalism can understand this tracking ecosystem.
In the best-case scenario, Collusion will help users fully control their own data. Currently, most privacy protection measures are not intuitive. For example, regarding Google's Cookies policy, users either agree or opt out. Facebook faces the same issue in this regard.
However, Merkley said: "We are not saying that all tracking behaviors bring negative effects and should be banned. We believe that people should be able to choose the extent to which their personal data is tracked. We don't yet have good methods, but Collusion will be the first step in development."
(Viking)
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