Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

[Posted February 28, 2012 by corbet]

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the availability of the Collusion add-on for Firefox. "Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers."

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 28, 2012 20:58 UTC (Tue) by felipebalbi (subscriber, #56613) [Link] (4 responses)

The funny thing is that Mozilla itself is sending information to webtrendslive.com and google.com

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 28, 2012 21:53 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Wanting to know where your info is going doesn't automatically mean that you don't want it going anywhere.

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 1:14 UTC (Wed) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]

True. I also filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=731314 about the bugzilla script, but the same idea applies to all the Mozilla sites.

Transparency is revealing!

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 3:38 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not so much funny as remarkably honest

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Mar 9, 2012 23:30 UTC (Fri) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

It's also unacceptable for a charity to spy on people visiting its website...

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 3:33 UTC (Wed) by jbv (guest, #66170) [Link] (7 responses)

LWN does no tracking at all. Nice.

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 8:54 UTC (Wed) by mordae (guest, #54701) [Link] (6 responses)

Except for Google Analytics, Google Adsense and OpenX?

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 9:16 UTC (Wed) by jbv (guest, #66170) [Link] (5 responses)

When I open the Collusion plugin page, LWN does not show up as any of the little circles?

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 9:26 UTC (Wed) by pricechild (guest, #78087) [Link] (4 responses)

I believe that's just a demo. Items show up there whether you've visited them or not, just to demo the functionality and shiny circles.

I'm still struggling to figure out what the addon actually does, but noscript/adblock/no 3rd party cookies may be hampering it...

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 12:43 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (3 responses)

With noscript+requestpolicy I see just 3 icons after browsing a large number of sites. And I had to whitelist connections from the addon.

If this is a "scare people into installing requestpolicy" tool then it may have a use, but otherwise not so much.

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 13:38 UTC (Wed) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (1 responses)

> And I had to whitelist connections from the addon.

I wonder how you did that. I've got noscript, cookiemonster, adblocker, better privacy and firebug installed. Collusion stays completely inert, even for pages that are whitelisted and actually do crossite cookies.

Same picture both under Linux and Windows FF.

Where/how did you whitelist the addon?
*t

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 18:17 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

This was in requestpolicy. I already allow local scripts in noscript, so there was no need to change that.

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Mar 5, 2012 9:52 UTC (Mon) by thisisme (guest, #83315) [Link]

Thank you. I've been a user of NoScript for some time but didn't know about RequestPolicy.

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 3:43 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see anything in the graph after visiting and browsing half a dozen different sites. Is this because I have the Referer header disabled in Firefox?

Mozilla: announcing "Collusion"

Posted Feb 29, 2012 16:31 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

Or because of some ad-blocking add-ons.