Mozilla's Collusion Privacy Protection Add-On is Gaining Fans

All of us who spend a great deal of time with digital devices have concerns about being tracked online, and these concerns are often especially pronounced among members of the open source community. In response to these concerns about online tracking, Mozilla delivered a Firefox extension not long ago called Collusion. You can get the add-on and watch a demo of it here, and we previously covered it here. It's designed to turn the tables on online spies, allowing you to see who is tracking you. In an address focused on privacy delivered at TED, Mozilla CEO Ted Kovacs sang the praises of Collusion, and it's gaining more traction with other Mozilla leaders.

 According to Mozilla:

"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."

You can also read up on the origin of the Collusion extension here.

At TED, Mozilla's Kovacs said "Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. Our voices matter and our actions matter even more." Network World has a video up of Kovacs' talk at TED, where he demonstrated how Collusion works.

Network World also has an interesting interview with Ryan Merkley, COO of the Mozilla Foundation, where he discusses Collusion and general privacy topics. As he notes, Collusion does not turn off trackers, although it may have some such features in future versions. It's primarily designed to let you see who is tracking you. 

Mozilla is among several companies that have become very focused on implementing do-not-track technology. We reported on Mozilla's efforts on this front in this post, and there are reports that many technology leaders online are campaigning for do-not-track buttons prominently placed in major browsers.

It won't be a surprise to see the technology behind Collusion become a standard part of Firefox. In the meantime, you can experiment with it, and for more on online anonymity technology that you can easily implement, check out our post here.