Lightbeam Will Let You To Track How The Third Party Sites Were Connected To Your PC

The level of security and privacy are always a controversial issue in the world of internet, do you agree with me? As we had notified issues like National Security Agency have been tapping users data like password, contacts and more from iPhone, Andriod and Blackberry devices, not only this there are lots & lots of privacy data being shared on the internet without any notifications to the user. And its a must to learn about internet by the users for protecting data from third party. We should be more conscious before sharing data in the internet and lets warn others too regarding this issue. And this edition is about a firefox add-on which will let us know the first and third party sites we interact with on the Web.

Lightbeam is a firefox add-on which enables us to know about the first and third party sites we interact with on the Web, we can download the add-on for free from Mozilla add-ons page. By using interactive visualization of Lightbeam we can track how the third party sites were connected to our PC by visiting a site. Before that you need to download and instal the add-on to your Firefox web browser. After installing the add-on you can see a new logo at the bottom right of your browser, and it is the newly installed Lightbeam logo. By clicking it you can view the interactive visualization of Lightbeam in a new tab.

Just below the Lightbeam logo you can see three different visualizations on the top left of the screen, and you can use those visualizations to view your web activity with the third party sites, you can also view the recent websites visited in Firefox web browser. The default visualization is the graph view. You can zoom in and out the graph by using the scroll key in mouse.

Few details about the three views you can make use of,

Graph view – You can view the first and third party sites you visited in a spider web structure with lots of linking made between the circles and triangles. Circles represent the visited sites, and triangles represent the third party sites. By clicking the triangles and circles you can view the time of access, server location with map and the number of connected sites with name on the right side of the web browser screen.

Clock view – You can examine the connections made over a 24-hour period.

List view – It will list out the visited and third party sites with check box at front. By clicking any link from the list you can view the time of access, server location with map and the number of connected sites with name  on the right side of the web browser screen.

Here’s the clock view screenshot,

If you would like to contribute few data to Lightbeam by uploading your data to the server, then click the OFF button found on the top right of the screen. By turning on contribution your data will be periodically updated to the server. If don’t want to share your data, let the OFF button remain aside.

Sure you would have feel bit clear about the links connected between sites while using internet. And its good to know how the data is being shared in the internet or how it is being connected between you and others. And we can name this edition as “Journey to the World Wide Web.”

Well its promising step from Lightbeam by having collaboration with Mozilla to help the users to get more control over their privacy issues. But there are some known facts about Firefox like higher RAM memory usage, frequent crashing and some other related issues. So Lightbeam will be highly appreciated if it is available for other major web browsers like Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer too.

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