14 DAY TRIAL // There's a lot of discussion about privacy and tracking on the web these days. There's plenty of hyperbole, but the issue is real, people generally give up certain amounts of expected privacy to use websites and web services. It's pretty much a given and it's a barter everyone has to make to enjoy most of the web.
But it doesn't have to be that way, at least, that's what Mozilla hopes. It's been a big advocate of user privacy and user rights in particular, one of the few in a place where users are not the customers but the goods being sold.
Mozilla is working on several ways of empowering the user, the Do Not Track header, an initiative adopted by most big advertisers, even Google, or the nascent BrowserID which would offer users an alternative identity service one which doesn't need as much data on you as it can possibly gather to make the most money.
Still, Mozilla is not against tracking and is not against companies making money online. Rather, the bigger issue is not the tracking itself but the lack of disclosure and the fact that users have too little information on what companies and sites have on them, how they are tracked and what they can do about it.
This is where Mozilla Collusion comes in, being a tool designed to keep track of the trackers. More to the point, it's meant to enable users to get a clear, visual representation of how their regular browsing is being tracked and how many third-party websites, advertisers, Like buttons, share buttons, analytics sites and so on, are loaded for each site they visit.
The add-on is in the early days, for now it doesn't do much besides display a nice graph of who's tracking you. In the future, Mozilla wants to use this data to build a database of known trackers, and how they work, in the hope of finding ways to bypass them, if users want to.