Are You Being Watched? - Find out with Lightbeam

Ever get that feeling that you’re being watched?

Source: Holly Marquardt

Well, when using the internet, you are!

While writing this post, it made me think of my crazy aunt. She’s always one to come up with crazy conspiracies and stories. I remember distinctly her talking just this past thanksgiving, about how when she’s browsing something on the internet, suddenly, she will start seeing adds on her facebook or receiving e-mails, about similar things to what she had recently searched. She spent much of that evening warning us, that we are being watched and tracked. Well this time, that crazy aunt, was not so crazy, she’s actually right.

Source: AfterMath

This is the one time I knew what she was saying was true, but I didn’t realize exactly how much I was being tracked. And I doubt other people do either.

Lightbeam is an add-on, for the browser firefox. It allows you to see what first party sites you visited, and its connections to any third party sites.

I downloaded lightbeam onto my laptop and began using the internet as I normally would. After only browsing the internet for approximately 20 minutes, I was shocked by the results.

Source: Holly Marquardt

According to Lightbeam, I had visited only 13 sites, but had connected with 302 third party sites! That’s right, 302 third party sites were tracking me in just a short 20 minute period!

Source: Lightbeam

The sites I had intentionally visited were Ebay, Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, my school website, Google, and a blog about rabbits. Ebay, by far, had the most connections to third party sites, which really was not a surprise to me. I was glad that my university site had the least number of third party connections, it appeared that only one connection to it was really unknown.

While using the tool lightbeam you can move your cursor around to see exactly what sites were connected. I noticed that most of them were just a bunch of random letters and numbers. Many of which, when I tried searching could not be found… weird. I’ll admit I don’t know a whole lot about technology and I’m pretty carefree when it comes to utilizing the internet. But after using the tool Lightbeam, it really made me concerned about my privacy and security. It really opened my eyes, I will surely be more cautious of what sites I visit, and what information I share from now on.

Source: Clipart Library