Show HN: A browser extension I made appeared on 60 Minutes(cbsnews.com)

33 pointsby byoogle12 lat temu11 comments

Show HN: A browser extension I made appeared on 60 Minutes

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/see-whos-watching-you-online/

6 comments

yeukhon12 lat temu

Can someone familiar with Disconnect compare it with Collusion? Feature wise what is missing in each?

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/

byoogle12 lat temu

OP here. The differences between (and history of) these two extensions are a bit confusing :-):

The parts of Disconnect that 60 Minutes showed actually started as a Chrome (from Firefox) port of Collusion that I did for a hackathon (https://blog.disconnect.me/collusion-for-chrome). Later, we updated and integrated this code into Disconnect (there’s a “Visualize page” option in Disconnect that brings up the graphical UI).

Mozilla has since made major updates to Collusion in the form of Lightbeam (a Firefox add-on). The Disconnect graphs are now much more like to the original Collusion and the Lightbeam graphs are brand new. But other than the visual differences, Disconnect and Lightbeam are functionally alike (Disconnect is also available on platforms other than Firefox: Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE, iOS, and [sort of] Android).

akanster12 lat temu

FYI the entire segment can be seen here: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-data-brokers-selling-your-pe...

hrrsn12 lat temu

I don't have the extension, but I wonder how many trackers/beacons there are on that CBS page.

sheetjs12 lat temu

Ghostery reports doubleclick, adsense, new relic, omniture, and visual revenue (also adobe typekit, but not sure whether you consider that a tracker/beacon)

Disconnect reports new relic, "google", visual revenue

EDIT to clarify: The answer wasn't intended to suggest that Ghostery blocks more or different ads/trackers compared to Disconnect. I just read off what the blockers reported.

byoogle12 lat temu

It sounds like you’re running at least Disconnect and Ghostery at the same time. You can’t do these comparisons with multiple filtering extensions running at the same time and get apples-to-apples results because if one extension blocks a request, other extensions don’t see the request (the install order [browser dependent] determines which extension has first crack at blocking).

With just Disconnect running (OP), I get this list (similar to AjithAntony):

facebook.com, plus.google.com, reddit.com, www.google.com, apis.google.com, twitter.com, google-analytics.com, livefyre.com, facebook.net, scorecardresearch.com, moatads.com, linkedin.com, doubleclick.net, fonts.googleapis.com, googleusercontent.com, gstatic.com, googletagservices.com, quantserve.com, youtube.com, ytimg.com, googlesyndication.com, 2mdn.net, visualrevenue.com, imrworldwide.com, conviva.com, lphbs.com, googleadservices.com, accounts.google.com, typekit.net, ru4.com, clicktale.net, bkrtx.com, fyre.co, theplatform.com, stumbleupon.com, securestudies.com, network-auth.com

AjithAntony12 lat temu

http://imgur.com/vCzFSUT

phoney12 lat temu

Curious, what kind of traffic this drove?

byoogle12 lat temu

We seem to be getting about 100K extra hits per day (and still going) since Sunday. (I have no idea if this is more or less traffic than one might expect.)

presty12 lat temu

congrats, but it's not like you haven't had $4M in funding :)

(btw, I'm a user since the early days)

higherpurpose12 lat temu

Congrats, but I wonder why they are doing this now. Are they trying to redeem themselves for that NSA show sell-out? Because if they are, this won't cut it.