F-Secure introduced a new feature for their Freedome VPN that lets people take control and see who’s watching them online.
The new feature is a visualization tool called Tracker Mapper that shows users how websites and online tracking work together to create data collection networks that watch people as they browse the web.
Tracker Mapper was released to beta testers in July, and was developed in response to Freedome users’ interest in online tracking. Tracking has become a prominent part of the Internet – over half of the top 100 domains on the World Wide Web exist entirely to provide advertising and tracking services.* And a recent survey conducted amongst people beta testing Tracker Mapper found that 87 percent of respondents were worried or concerned about online tracking.**
F-Secure’s Janne Pirttilahti, Director, Next Gen Security, said that Freedome users want more information on how tracking works because it’s a part of their online experience that’s difficult to understand. “The commercial surveillance industry isn’t really visible to most people. People know that companies are tracking them online, but they don’t know how the process works, what kind of information companies are looking for, or how to stop it. Tracker Mapper helps people learn more about online tracking so they can start to take back control of how they expose themselves online.”
Tracker Mapper creates a 24-hour record of the tracking attempts and malicious websites that Freedome blocks while people browse online. It displays this information in a real-time interactive visualization that shows how different websites and third party trackers create data collection networks that monitor people on the web. People can toggle the feature on/off and delete the records at any time, and as an added privacy measure, all data is automatically purged after three days. People can also export the data as a text file so they can store it locally for their own analytics, or even share and compare it with friends.
It is currently available for iOS, Android, Windows PC, OS X, and Amazon Fire devices. Tracker Mapper is now available for Freedome’s OS X and Windows PC offerings, and is expected to be rolled out to mobile devices later in the year.
