2. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Motivation (as advertised by developers)
• Presented on the morning of 28th of February at TED by Mozilla CEO, Gary Kovacs
• The revenues involved in the top online tracking companies in the space is over $39
billion
• Kovacs mentioned that by the time his 9 year-old daughter had visited 4 sites over
breakfast she was being tracked by 25 different places. And in the course of the day
he found himself being tracked by 150.
• Describes the medium as “an area of consumer protection that’s almost entirely
naked,”
• “Privacy is not an option,” Kovacs said in his presentation. “It shouldn’t be the price
we accept for just getting on the internet.”
• “The memory of the internet is forever,” Kovacs said. “We are being watched. It’s now
time for us to watch the watchers.”
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3. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Motivation (as advertised by developers)
• “Take control of your data”
– recognizing the importance of transparency
– Empowering users with tools and information
– See who is tracking you and turn off the tracking when desired
• “Telling the global tracking story” – user data can be part of the larger
story
• “Building user awareness” – help people understand online data
tracking (benefits and issues) and help them make their own choices
• “Collusion is about choice” – tracking happens without the users’
consent and without their knowledge
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4. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Description
• Experimental
• Firefox add-on that allows to see the third parties that track your online
activity
• Real time results
• Creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other
trackers
• Kovacs mentions that Collusion is about alerting users to tracking that’s
happening without their consent and not about services that provide
recommendations based on history
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6. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Outlook
• Each time it detects data being sent to a behavioral tracker, it creates a
dot:
– Red: advertisers;
– Grey: websites;
– Blue: on the visualization
shows the links between the sites you visit and the trackers they work with.
• Mozilla has created an online demo to show just how quickly user data
ends up tracked by dozens of different companies whenever you
navigate from popular websites (e.g. IMDB, The New York Times).
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7. www.sti-innsbruck.at
Future developments
• The full version of Collusion will allow users to opt-in to sharing
anonymous data in a global database of web tracker data.
• The information will be combined and made available to journalists,
researchers, and others who wish to analyze and explain how data is
tracked on the web
• Collusion will allow users to choose who is tracking their data and who
should not (Firefox already has a built in option of turning off tracking)
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