Aside from the plethora of scummy privateness practices Facebook makes use of to trace your each transfer on its myriad platforms, the corporate’s additionally provide you with loads of sneaky methods to maintain tabs on you off its websites as nicely. Now, a brand new examine desires to combat again towards these offsite trackers by… monitoring them again. Researchers at Mozilla introduced this week the launch of its “Facebook Pixel Hunt” examine, which seeks to trace the corporate’s immense web-wide monitoring community and examine the intel it’s accumulating on customers.

As the title suggests, this examine is concentrated on a bit of monitoring tech referred to as the “Facebook pixel.” Chances are, you’ve visited a web site that makes use of it; these tiny items of tech are buried in actually millions of sites throughout the net, from on-line shops to information shops to… nicely, you title it. In change for onboarding a free pixel on their web site, these websites can then monitor their very own guests and microtarget advertisements with the identical form of precision you’d count on from a data-hungry firm like Facebook.

In change for giving these websites the facility to trace each pageview, buy, search question, and much, much more, Facebook (naturally) requires that this information be shared with it, too. In instances the place the web site customer has an account on some Facebook platform, this offsite information simply will get glombed onto no matter Facebook already is aware of about that particular person. If they don’t have a Facebook account, then the corporate collects that information anyway, and makes use of it to create a “shadow profile” of that specific particular person.

These are the types of shadowy practices that Mozilla’s crew desires to analysis with this examine—and you may assist them do it should you’re a Firefox person. Mozilla teamed up with reporters from the Markup to assemble particulars about Facebook monitoring utilizing a free-to-download browser extension, Mozilla Rally, that can hoover up information despatched out by Facebook’s pixels as you browse throughout the net.

Aside from that information, the extension additionally retains monitor of the time spent on completely different net pages, the URLs that the browser visits, and extra. Mozilla was fast to notice in its announcement that the one information being exported from the extension can be de-identified, and never shared with any third events moreover the Markup’s reporters. (Disclosure: Gizmodo lately partnered with the Markup on a 17-month investigation into predictive policing expertise.)

It’s a fairly candy examine that’s consistent with a number of the earlier crowdsourced work that Mozilla’s carried out previously. Most lately, it partnered with researchers at Princeton University to trace how completely different customers faucet into political information tales or tales concerning the ongoing pandemic. Before that, the corporate created a separate extension, the “RegretsReporter,” that pulled information from folks’s YouTube suggestions to analysis the types of terrible rabbit holes that platform was attempting to push its customers down.