Who's tracking you on the web? Find out with Collusion.

There is a new add-on for your Firefox browser called Collusion. I just downloaded it and installed in on my computer.  Collusion generates a network diagram of the website you visit and other sites from that one.  All of them collect information about you and share that information. Collusion a way to see who is tracking you.

Here's a snippet from my visit to Contentions, a political blog.

You can see the blog itself in the center.  What I didn't know, but now I do, is that Contentions shares my visit to them with 23 (count 'em!) other sites. Whoa! That's a lot of sites that know about me that I don't necessary want to having anything to do with them.  Some of these sites may be innocuous, but some are tracking me to use that information to make money or generate ads.  With the Collusions diagram on a tabbed page (you simply click on the Collusions icon on your Firefox toolbar at the bottom of the window) you can put your mouse over any node to see what the node is. Also, Collusion gives you information on

It's not clear to me what to do about this, but the first step is to know that there's a problem. Collusion is showing us the problem.

Here's some of what Collusion reports on my visit to Contentions (with a cut and paste just below):

"When you visit commentarymagazine.com, it informs the following websites about you.

• google.com
• doubleclick.net
• addthis.com
• turn.com
• afy11.net
• openx.net
• wtp101.com
• revsci.net
• adnxs.com
• yieldmanager.com
• quantserve.com
• mathtag.com
• invitemedia.com
• jewishideasdaily.com
• contextweb.com
• scorecardresearch.com
• nrelate.com
• rfihub.com
• vizu.com
• advertising.com
• pointroll.com
• gwallet.com
• serving-sys.com"

Some of these sites I know about, and some I don't know about. But for all of them, I had no intention of telling them about myself. Yet, with a click to one site, these others know about me. That's scary.