Collusion Firefox Add-on Launched, Tells Users Who Are Tracking Them Online

Collusion - A newly launched Mozilla Firefox add-on that visualize users which sites or services are tracking them every time they visit a website by showing interactive and real time graph.

Collusion, a firefox addon developed by Jono X and Dethe Elza, is an experimental and evolving browser extension for Firefox that provides information by creating an interactive, real-time graph of all tracking and behavioral cookies  downloaded by the browser as they browse from one website to another.

Behavioral cookies are ones that record links users have clicked on, contents they viewed as well as queries they made on the site. This information may not seem important to the majority of internet users but they do matter a lot to advertisers and companies that offer optimization services online. You’ll be amazed to know that by visiting a website, there are around ten services tracking your activities.

The graph Collusion display clustered circular icons. The site you visited will be the one in the center represented by its favicon and surrounded by services being used in the site like social media networks, and Google services like Google Analytics and Google User Content.

According to PCWorld, Mozilla says that all tracking data Collusion collects is stored locally on your computer and never leaves your possession. You can reset the graph at any time to delete Collusion's database. The add-on also features an export function, but in my tests this feature wasn't functioning properly.

Collusion Developer Says, We're working on adding more features, such as being able to upload an anonymized version of your Collusion data so we can build a big picture view of the tracker ecosystem. We're also working on visualizing other methods of tracking besides third-party cookies and improving the visualizations generally.

Collusions Firefox Plugin can be downloaded here.