Mozilla Lightbeam

» see addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/lightbeam as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed lightbeam. the extension was the kind of thing a working privacy researcher installed, the kind of thing that got demoed at a ted talk, the kind of thing that ended up on a slide in a journalism conference. it was not the kind of thing the average firefox user opened twice. i installed it for about a week in 2014 after reading a wired piece about the tracker graph it drew. by the second week the tab was closed and i had forgotten the icon was in the toolbar.

atul varma at mozilla wrote the first version in july 2011 under the name collusion. you turned it on and went about your normal browsing. lightbeam watched every request your browser made and built a live force-directed graph of which third-party domains were loading on which sites, drawing lines between the page you visited and every tracker, analytics pixel, ad server, social widget, and cdn that loaded along with it. by the second hour the graph had a couple hundred nodes. by the second day it looked like a city map drawn with a sharpie.

mozilla adopted it as an official project in 2012 with ford foundation backing, and it was renamed lightbeam in 2013. the audience was always going to be small, the point was the demo effect. you showed a non-technical person their own tracking graph and they understood third-party cookies in about thirty seconds. that demo had no direct competitor in the consumer privacy space at the time, and so lightbeam stayed alive for almost a decade on the strength of being the screenshot.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

lightbeam ran a content script in every tab and observed the network requests the browser made. when a request went to a third-party domain the extension stored it in a local indexeddb store, never sending anything off your machine unless you explicitly chose to share. the visualization view rendered the data with d3, with sites drawn as squares and trackers as circles, the size of the node proportional to how many other sites it appeared on. you could pause it, filter it, watch it grow as you browsed.

the part that aged badly was the data model. by 2017 most of the trackers lightbeam wanted to show were being blocked by ublock origin or noscript or firefox's own enhanced tracking protection, which mozilla shipped by default in 2018. lightbeam was a visualization layer on top of unblocked third-party requests, and most of those requests no longer happened. the graph became sparser and the demo became less dramatic.

~ the funny part ~

mozilla's own enhanced tracking protection ate lightbeam's audience. by the time firefox 65 turned the blocking on by default in early 2019, the constellation lightbeam had been showing for years was getting trimmed at the browser level before lightbeam saw it. that is the better outcome for users and the slow death for the visualization. the addons store removed lightbeam in october 2019 with a short note saying mozilla would no longer maintain it. the source is still on github, marked archived.

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