T.EX is a Web extension for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers to visualize data flows and relationships between websites. It is inspired by Lightbeam for Firefox. The development of this Web extension has been discussed in the paper Towards Real-Time Web Tracking Detection with T. EX-The Transparency EXtension.
This version of T.EX (T.EX-v1) is a proof of concept implementation, which is no longer maintained. It can be still used for demonstration purposes. For the most recent version of T.EX (T.EX-v2) check out t-ex-tools/t.ex.
- Clone or download the repository to your local drive
- Open Chrome and navigate to More tools -> Extensions
- Enable Developer mode (switch on the upper right)
- Click on Load unpacked
- Select the downloaded repository and click Open
T.EX collects data in the background, while you browse the Web. To protect your data, T.EX uses encryption. In order to so, you have to create a key pair first before you can collect data. After you successfully installed the extension, click on the T.EX icon (see Figure 1, Step 1). T.EX will be opened in a new tab. Click on the gear icon at the bottom right of the screen (see Figure 1, Step 2). Afterwards the settings view will open. Click on Generate key pair (see Figure 1, Step 3) and then choose a password. You can now visit websites to collect data. To view the graph, open T.EX again by clicking on the T.EX icon or by reloading the tab T.EX was opened in.
Figure 1
The development of the Web extension and results of an analysis of the performance of the extension are discussed in the paper Towards Real-Time Web Tracking Detection with T. EX-The Transparency EXtension by Raschke and Küpper (2018). You can access the paper by clicking on this link.