This week, the tech company Mozilla announced that it has created a program to help users understand how much Facebook and its parent company Meta are tracking their activity. The program, called the Facebook Pixel Hunt, will be conducted together with a nonprofit journalism organization and volunteer Mozilla users.

To help out with the study, users need to install Rally (a privacy-first data-sharing platform created by Mozilla) and then sign up for the Pixel Hunt study. After that, the tool will gather their data as they surf the web and send it to the two organizations for analysis.

“According to its own privacy policy, Facebook may collect information about you across the web even if you don’t have a Facebook account,” the program’s site reads. “One way Facebook performs this tracking is through a network of ‘pixels’ that may be installed on many of the sites you visit. By joining this study, you will help Rally and The Markup investigate and report on where Facebook is tracking you and what kind of information they are collecting.”

 Of course, it will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to this study. They’ve acted quickly to shut down similar research activity in the past. Still, if it’s allowed to continue, this feature could be an eye-opening exercise for users who may not be aware of just how much Facebook is snooping on them.

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