Online tracking is not a new concept to me. It is something I have been aware of for years. Lightbeam is rather interesting in terms of it telling me not only how many sites are tracking me but which sites are tracking me. While I know that Firefox is the best browser in terms of security, I am rather faithful to Google Chrome. I did think about switching browsers a while back, but considering I also use Chrome as my password manager it seemed like too much effort.

In terms of tracking I will say that what I was very surprised about was when I would have conversations with friends and then shortly after I would get ads on Facebook that were for whatever I had been talking to my friends about. The thought that my cell mic was being accessed without my consent lead me to take online privacy a lot more seriously. I bought a VPN that allows me double protection as I can run it on my laptop, but then also run it as an Extension on Chrome. I have Do Not Track requests enabled on my browser and I block third party cookies. I run extensions such as Disconnect and UBlock Origin which block ads, analytics and content requests. Furthermore, I have enabled the advanced settings of UBlock Origin so I universally by default block third party frames and scripts.

All of this is to say that while Lightbeam is interesting, I already get most of this data from my current Extensions. I have noticed the the site I use most often with the highest number of requests blocked is Gmail. I only installed the UBlock origin Extension rather recently, perhaps a few months, and it has already blocked almost 80,000 requests. That’s enough to make a person wonder if we should be taking this more seriously.