Interview With Mozilla's Ryan Merkley: Tracking the Trackers
colinneagle writes "Among the eye-opening statements in his recent TED talk, Mozilla CEO Gary 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.' After you download and install Collusion in Firefox, you can 'see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods,' Kovacs stated. 'Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the Internet is forever. We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers.' I've been using Collusion for some time now and it is jaw-dropping to watch all the sites that still stalk us across the web even with DNT and privacy add-ons. The Collusion page states: 'The Ford Foundation is supporting Mozilla to develop the Collusion add-on so it will enable users to not only see who is tracking them across the Web, but also to turn that tracking off when they want to.'"
Their dependency on Google is why Firefox doesn't ship with something like AdBlock+ or NoScript. Instead, they want you to tell Google "please don't track me" -- but how liberally Google interprets it is up to them. It's not like you can tell how much data Google collects on you even if you have "don't track" checked.