Who's Watching You Online?

This week, I was asked to engage in a Web-surfing exercise using Lightbeam (for Firefox) to see who's tracking me online. Specifically, Lightbeam shows both the sites you visited intentionally and the third-party sites that you have connected to without your knowledge, graphically representing the connections:

Lightbeam Web-surfing Connections Graph

In just a few minutes of browsing some of my regular haunts--a popular blog site, Facebook, my online banking site, a television website, YouTube, Google, and several educational institutions--I managed to connect with 115 third-party sites, though I only intentionally visited 15 sites. I'm pleased to report that I didn't connect with any third-party sites through my visit to my financial institution's online banking site. Two different television networks, however, connected me to 28 and 26 third-party sites, respectively. Even the blog site that I visited connected me to 15 other sites. "Google" showed up in many of the site addresses, emphasizing the ubiquity and connectedness of all things Google online.

The Google empire is a prime example of "big data" in action, demonstrating the reach and interoperability of a massive data set that works to provide all kinds of online services. As my digital skills and knowledge grow, I'm learning how handy the Google empire can be. Just this past week, I've collaborated on Google Hangouts, prepared a presentation in Google Presentations, dropped files into a Google dropbox, and accessed Google Drive to edit a document collaboratively.

Nonetheless, between Google, Facebook, and television networks (to name the top contenders in my set), I wonder just how much data is being collected under my IP address and how this data is being used to attempt to shape my world or influence my choices. Although I try to avoid overt paranoia, I nonetheless feel good about not posting too much information about my identity on social media sites, setting my privacy settings relatively high, and deleting the identifiers on my teenage son's Facebook page repeatedly.

While social media allows me to stay connected, and I appreciate the need for authentic engagement, the important people in my life will know the important identity details, and potential cyberstalkers will have less data to work with. I also feel as though my investment in anti-virus software is money well spent, and that my Browser of choice (Firefox) supports my interest in keeping the data in my Windows software a little safer.

 

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