Who tracks the trackers that track you online? You can, with Lightbeam.

When your browser landed on this article, it didn't just talk to the friendly servers at washingtonpost.com. It also made contact with Chartbeat, a company that helps us understand where else you've been on the Web, and how you're interacting with the site. Your browser also connected to a personalized news applet called Trove, various marketing plug-ins and a social bookmarking service run by a company known as AddThis.

To help you see which sites are sending your information to third parties, the folks at Mozilla have designed a way to visualize these trackers. It's called Lightbeam. (Unfortunately, the tool works only on Mozilla's Firefox browser). When you launch it, it shows up blank -- an empty canvas waiting for your browsing history to turn it into a detailed online portrait of you. So what can consumers do with this information? Mozilla hopes they'll become more conscious of the Web's underlying connective tissue. Beyond that, the company doesn't get much into specifics.