Lightbeam for Firefox – Shine a Light on Who’s Watching You

Odd that the product page for Lightbeam makes no mention of the granular blocking feature. It's almost like they don't want to advertise that, rather calling it a visualisation tool.

Not until you install it and take a look do you find that blocking any particular site is easy to do and manage.

I've noticed a few sites I regularly visit are faster now that I've blocked some of their third party tracking and advertising crap with lightbeam. I've even blocked facebook.com and facebook.net, I hate their stupid junky web page widgets cluttering the web. Now I'm finally rid of it. Sure, I can't visit Facebook at all, but that's a small price for not seeing any of their crappy like buttons on the web anymore.

I disabled this plug-in months ago because I was not too interested in who is watching me (of which I know - google analytics, facebook, and most importantly the NSA). I was rather more interested in blocking their APIs, scripts, e.t.c. Hence, I began to use reactive mechanisms - plugins like HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, RefControl and Ghostery. I know they are intertwined (i.e. some doing the same work). But I prefer that approach to a listing or graphical visualization of who watches me (with little of no (re)action).