It's not something that will be slowing any time soon. But that isn't for a lack of trying. Kovacs unveiled a new Firefox add-on named Collusion on Tuesday at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference TED , a visualization tool that depicts the number and different types of sites that are tracking your browsing as you surf the web.
Like some color-coded breakdown of alien DNA, Collusion composes a dot matrix diagram composed of grey dots -- sites you've visited or are visiting -- connected to red dots: sites that have passed your browser tracking cookies to monitor your site navigation.
Some of the cookies are shared by sites, so cross-navigation browsing is determinable. That's valuable data for advertisers, among others. The end-game idea, Kovacs says, is to eventually launch Collusion on a grand scale, allowing users to opt-in and share their tracking data anonymously to a database, one which will be accessible to researchers and others for study and analysis. This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules.
Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked. So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further. The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you.
The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me. The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to. And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web.
And this is my profile. So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal. I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day. Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email. I then go to a news site, look for some headlines. And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network.
Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school? Now let me stop here. We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me.
I have navigated to a total of four. So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day. I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day — in this case, actually fairly pedantic — and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile.
The red dots have exploded. The gray dots have grown exponentially. All in all, there's over sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent. I look at this picture and it freaks me out. This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple — it's huge business. The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today. And as adults, we're certainly not alone. At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter.
And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile. This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children's sites. I move from this, from freaked out to enraged. This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent.
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