See Who's tuning in when you visit a website. Below are 25 Websites showing who's there when you show up (see purple boxes for list). I was curious and wanted to know, so I took screen shots of each website, uploaded to flickr, and presented the 25 Website screen shots here to make it easier to do a comparison.
TO BETTER READ THE PEEP LIST for each site, double click on the pic which will take you to a larger version at flickr.com.
And before I forget to mention it, Ghostery won't show up as an app. On my iMac/Safari it shows up as a little black ghost with a red number IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER of the page. Just click on the Ghost to see who is tracking, etc.
ENJOY!
OK big quite obvious disclaimer: I know nothing about computers, networks, software, or the internet. Also, I put this together mostly so I could compare and find out if some of the peeps show up more often than others. That said, I apologize if this isn't that well-written. Family requirements leave me with little time these days.
That said, I somehow found a service called Ghostery that shows who is watching your activity on websites. From Ghostery's website, it states the following features:
At Ghostery, we believe in enabling informed decisions about your control over your online privacy. The more you learn about the companies trading your online behavioral data, the better you can make decisions about how to control your exposure to those companies.
CONTROL: Ghostery™ allows you to block scripts from companies that you don't trust, delete local shared objects, and even block images and
iframes. Ghostery puts your web privacy back in your hands.''
DETECT: Ghostery™ sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
LEARN: After showing you who's tracking you, Ghostery™ also gives you a chance to learn more about each company it identifies. How they describe themselves, a link to their privacy policies, and a sampling of pages where we've found them are just a click away.
So with Ghostery installed, the purple boxes show WHO'S WATCHING when you visit a website. The purple box disappears after less than a minute on a website.
The following are 25 screen shots of popular websites I captured BEFORE I used the Ghostery BLOCK feature.
Is it possible that one or more of these assist NSA in one of those private/public partnerships?
Looking for similarities and explanations.
Perhaps the DailyKos technical team can help us better understand what these list mean? Are the items on the purple list invited BY the website owner? What are these different services? Who pays for them? How do they make money? Do they pay the website owners?
You will see that some sites have a really long list while others have just a few. Why?
I will leave an evaluation of the information up to the technically-minded.
I am just sharing what seems to be some interesting data.
I'll begin with DailyKos.
DAILYKOS, not logged on
DAILYKOS, after logging on
COMCAST.NET
COMCAST.NET EMAIL SIGN ON PAGE
WHEN YOU DOWNLOAD GHOSTERY, you can opt out ie BLOCK all these peeps, some of which are services like the Twitter Button which is the only one I don't block, but might. Not that hard to copy/paste to twitter.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
COMCAST.NET after SIGNING IN EMAIL ACCOUNT
I checked these three steps for Comcast.net to see if there were any differences.
FOX NEWS
MSNBC
THE GUARDIAN
REDDIT
RED STATE
THE HILL
THE ECONOMIST
OCCUPY WALL STREET
THE DAILY CALLER
TPM
BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
LOS ANGELES TIMES
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND
TWITTER, not logged on
ALTERNET
WASHINGTON POST
NEW YORK TIMES
HUFFINGTON POST
P J MEDIA
LASTLY AND IMPORTANTLY
Oh, after downloading Ghostery and blocking the peeps, the same purple box shows up with the same peeps BUT WITH the names crossed out with dashes. This way, you can see if a new peep has shown up.
Ghostery makes it possible to block 1,528 peeps. Here's the breakdown from Ghostery
I am off to check out DO NOT TRACK ME
At the bottom of this link, there are lots of PRIVACY SERVICES. I chose Ghostery because it is FREE.
I'm not sure if these services are real or just psychological decoration but, hey, it is nice to see WHO THE PEEPS ARE.