alexfowler

Yes! I'm a loyal Thunderbird user, too. It's been great to see our community continuing to support the program.

We spent a ton of time working with online publishers in developing Lightbeam. The prevalence of non­transparent online tracking continues to grow year over year. A recent study by the company Evidon, which produces the Ghostery add-on, showed a 53 percent increase in trackers from the prior year. Only 45 percent of the tracking tags identified by Evidon were placed there by the publisher of the site. So we have a goal to develop a crowdsourced open database from users of Lightbeam (on an opt-in basis), which we plan to make available to publishers to understand how third party services, widgets, ad tech, etc. are performing on their sites.

We have a nice group of folks here who use Firefox. How would you respond?

Lightbeam provides an option under the List view to either place a domain on a watch list or block it outright. We believe this is part of the educational value of the add-on to provide users with a way to play with and better understand the role of the companies they are interacting with on the Web.

Great question. When we launched the original version of Lightbeam, which was called Collusion, members of our community grabbed the code from Github and created versions for Safari and Chrome. We're hoping the same thing happens again. Here's the link to where all the Lightbeam code is online: https://github.com/mozilla/lightbeam