Friday, October 25, 2013

Gather your own Big Data with #Lightbeam from Mozilla Firefox #awesome

Today I noticed quite a bit of news and traffic on Twitter about a new tool that allows you to track the first and third party sites you interact with when browsing the Web. It is called Lightbeam and can be added to Firefox from here. In just a few moments I visited Amazon, YouTube, and this website. It is surprising how many sites interacted with this. When I visited www.eugeneoloughlin.com - 28 sites were connected even though I typed in just one URL. The graphics are also very cool - here's the one for the above 28:


It updates every time you visit a new site, and you can capture and save the data (in a JSON file). This is an awesome use of analytics and will really inform users just how much tracking is going on. I wonder if the CIA and MI5 have already figured out a way not to be tracked by this?

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