Collusion tracking visualization add-in from Firefox

First, I am a digital marketing professional and proponent of personalization and the value that cookies can provide to enhance user experiences (in both professional and personal life). With the news that Internet Explorer 10 will be released with web tracking defaulted to off and watching this latest TED video from CEO Gary Kovacs it gave me pause to see how people are gaming the system and how data collection on the web is still very much a nascent space.



I used the the Firefox add-in called Collusion to show the number of people that are tracking me as I migrate the web. I visited five sites and found 25 companies tracking.  This is a really interesting tool and one that brings up valid privacy concerns. Beyond ad exchanges, and ad servers who are all these other companies and how are they getting tags placed?