In July last year, Toolness, released a cool Firefox add-on, named Collusion, that draws a pretty visualisation of who's tracking you as you visit different sites. It gained some popularity after Gary Kovacs, Mozilla CEO, showed it off in his TED talk yesterday.
It's a great little add-on for making something quite hard to explain to people quite visible. However, I didn't like the fact that it only showed trackers that set a cookie. For example, the requests to Facebook to fetch Like button JS, or calls to Google Analytics were being missed. There are lots of ways to track people other than cookies. So I edited the add-on to include third-parties to whom a request was made, but where a cookie wasn't set.
Continue reading "Tracking the Trackers (my mods to the Collusion AddOn)"