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Mozilla Labs Experiment Distills Your History Into Interests

Posted by Unknown on from the enjoys-long-trolls-on-the-beach dept.

Barence writes "Mozilla is proposing that the Firefox browser collects data on users' interests to pass on to websites. The proposal is designed to allow websites to personalize content to visitors' tastes, without sites having to suck up a user's browsing history, as they do currently. 'Let's say Firefox recognizes within the browser client, without any browsing history leaving my computer, that I'm interested in gadgets, comedy films, hockey and cooking,' says Justin Scott, a product manager from Mozilla Labs. 'Those websites could then prioritize articles on the latest gadgets and make hockey scores more visible. And, as a user, I would have complete control over which of my interests are shared, and with which websites.'" This is the result of an extended experiment. The idea is that your history is used to generate a set of interests which you can then share voluntarily with websites, hopefully discouraging the blanket tracking advertising systems love to do now.

32 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. interesting take. by stewsters · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It makes sense if advertising companies were nice people, but please never turn this on by default. Most likely they will just add the info that you supply them to their trove of tracking data.

    1. Re:interesting take. by Coryoth · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It makes sense if advertising companies were nice people, but please never turn this on by default. Most likely they will just add the info that you supply them to their trove of tracking data.

      It could work; it's not sending any data that couldn't be extracted from your history anyway (which they are largely getting now via blanket tracking) so it's not especially detrimental to the user. On the other hand it is essentially doing the data mining and summarisation that the advertisers are going to have to do on the client side ahead of time. Getting your product to do some of your compute work for you may be enough of a carrot to get advertisers to end up taking this is preference to all the raw data collected by pervasive tracking.

      --
      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    2. Re:interesting take. by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      It could work; it's not sending any data that couldn't be extracted from your history anyway (which they are largely getting now via blanket tracking) so it's not especially detrimental to the user.

      Well, depending on how much you are blocking cookies and trying to keep information out of the hands of advertisers and other internet douchebags, you may feel differently.

      If anything, I expect Mozilla to be leading in enabling privacy ... but if they're doing this, then they're just going down a road I disagree with.

      How about you develop tools to keep my information out of the hands of those 3rd parties? Instead they just seem to be looking to become yet another broker of your information.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:interesting take. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How about we eliminate the ability of our browsers to track and report on everything we do? Surely you can see the profound privacy concerns that arise when the browser is the main data gathering device? The marketing/data/ad companies that already try this kind of thing are not trustworthy and will still track visitors no matter what information Mozilla sells them or what agreement not to track they sign.

      We don't need to worry about a website trying to track us and selling anything and everything they can find about us (which they will do anyway even if Mozilla is selling our information to all comers)? Now we need to worry about Firefox joining the 'spy on every user' landscape?

      This type of approach means that not even a plug-in, add-on or extension can stop the intrusion into each Firefox user's privacy. Even our https & private browsing sessions will now be saved and sold by Mozilla.

      I guess we don't need to worry about man-in-the-middle attacks when we have mozilla-in-the-browser doing it.

    4. Re:interesting take. by KitFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The use of Adblock and similar to help reduce (not remove) blanket tracking combined with this means that it becomes opt in and as a "product", the user is still valuable and thus still "fed" free stuff.

      I think one of the more interesting considerations is that if this takes off and more militant anti-blanket-tracking occurs, perhaps we can have more control over what the advertisers try to decide about us. For example, a ferret owner researching baby food for a sick ferret is highly unlikely to want to get flooded with a massive number of "your new baby!" ads and coupons for diapers and cribs and wipes. (True story, mind you. Owned ferrets. Researched three baby food items from Google. Within a month, I could have saved thousands from all the discounts and coupons I was offered for baby stuff. Gah.)

      Quite sure it won't stop advertisers from knowing when somebody is pregnant based on them buying blue rugs and lotion though.

      --

      @Whee

    5. Re:interesting take. by ComputerInsultant · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The content and advertizing companies are already tracking us in ways that are frustrating and scary (https://panopticlick.eff.org/). This proposal is about making it easier for me to tell the advertizing companies what I want to see ads for. No more embarrassing ads about my fetishes when I visit amazon, firefox tells them what I want to see.

      This could be a good thing.

      --
      engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff
    6. Re:interesting take. by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This proposal is about making it easier for me to tell the advertizing companies what I want to see ads for.

      I don't wish to see ads, and I block at my router and browser as many other things as possible.

      You may think it's nice, but I believe this is a terrible idea -- it should be private by default and require action to make it send anything more.

      The last thing I want is Mozilla deciding they're just like Google and Facebook and that my browsing history is their resource to be monetized.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    7. Re:interesting take. by Coryoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It could work; it's not sending any data that couldn't be extracted from your history anyway (which they are largely getting now via blanket tracking) so it's not especially detrimental to the user.

      Well, depending on how much you are blocking cookies and trying to keep information out of the hands of advertisers and other internet douchebags, you may feel differently.

      Mozilla has said this is something you can opt out of, so it's no worse than blocking cookies etc. (and, in fact, is probably easier).

      How about you develop tools to keep my information out of the hands of those 3rd parties? Instead they just seem to be looking to become yet another broker of your information.

      Looked at the right way, this is almost exactly that. Presume for a moment that it works (a big if) and advertisers take to using this instead of pervasive tracking. Now we're is a place where we have a single central point of data release to advertisers; you can turn it off; you can potentially drop in a plug in that publishes a hand-crafted/approved list of "interests" instead of mining your history for it; etc. If it works it does give more control to users over their privacy.

      The reality is that information is currency these days, and people will mine for this sort of data because it is valuable. You won't have much luck just blocking everything because the incentives to find a way around whatever blocks are put in place are high. So, assuming information is going to be given, trying to give the user more control over what information is handed over seems like a good thing. I doubt this particular plan will actually work, but I expect something along these lines will happen eventually.

      --
      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
    8. Re:interesting take. by maden · · Score: 2

      As far as I'm aware, recent browsers don't permit sites to access the history. I know of the history.previous / history.next, but these are only permissible when using local content such as plugins, or local webapps. But now that I think of it, couldn't a website load a bunch of web URLs in a hidden frame, and then analyze said URLs's CSS properties to see if they have been visited before? If that's possible, that would be a semi-transparent way to observe where the user hangs out on the internet, I suppose.

    9. Re:interesting take. by Ghostworks · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, this is a more recent (on the scale of years) method: load a bunch of links, let the user's browser assign them properties based on whether they've been visited or not, then let the site's javascript read back the properties from DOM. This is in addition to more direct methods such as cookies (we know where you've been because some party we have an agreement with has been keeping a log for us), super-cookies (we know where you've been through cookie-like files from flashand other things that don't typically get cleared), and 1x1 pixel images images (we know where you've been because you've been phoning home to an image server with every page load).

    10. Re:interesting take. by maden · · Score: 2

      It seems to be fixed in most major browers, and I can't reproduce it locally on the lastest Firefox. This blog post talks about it a bit more.

    11. Re:interesting take. by Githaron · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Without a proxy of some sort, how are you going to prevent websites from tracking you? At the very least, web servers need a IP address to send its content to on request. There is no way for the browser to disable the web server's ability to log that data request. If they can log the data, they can share that data with third-parties in order to get a better idea of the interests of those that IP address. If you want your sessions to persist across mutiple visits/requests from that website, some sort of session id needs to be sent from your browser and then you have the same senario.

      As far as I know, most tracking is done via third-party cookies and javascript scripts that log your visits directly. The best you can do in that regard is block those cookies/scripts. Of course, if such a feature was on by default, the tracking/advertising agencies would simply require that the website owners send the information via the server-side and now everyone is worse off because there is nothing you can do about it.

      Combine with some tech down the road, Firefox's solution might actually help. By reporting your interests to websites though your pre-processed browser history or manual settings, you decrease the incentive of advertising agencies of spending addtional resources tracking and computing your interests. After wide adoption, Firefox can then start blocking tracking cookies and scripts by default. They could also start onion routing through other Firefox users' browsers. While advertising agencies can still go through the previously mentioned backend route, why spend the resources organizing and developing such a network if they are already getting 99% or what they want unless that 1% is at least as valuable as the resources needed to be spend developing that system? With so much obfuscation it probably isn't worth it.

    12. Re:interesting take. by washort · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The last thing I want is Mozilla deciding they're just like Google and Facebook and that my browsing history is their resource to be monetized.

      This is Mozilla trying to build tools to let users monetize themselves if they so desire. Your browsing history is your resource. The experiment so far has been collecting this data and showing it to the user. The concept being explored now is whether to add a button for letting you send this data to a website. The idea is that this lets you share your interests with a site, without the site having to use tracking cookies to collect your browsing history (as Google and Facebook do).

  2. Search and replace by chinton · · Score: 2, Insightful
    s/article/ad/g

    s/content/ad/g

    1. Re:Search and replace by DougOtto · · Score: 4, Funny

      I see what you sed there.

      --
      Solving Unix problems since 1989...
    2. Re:Search and replace by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's all grep to me.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Search and replace by chinton · · Score: 4, Funny

      Stop the puns or I'll have to bash someone.

    4. Re:Search and replace by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      go fsck yourself. ;-)

      (OK, I do apologize for that, meant only in jest I assure you =)

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:Search and replace by chinton · · Score: 2

      There are perls of wisdom in what I said. Stick that in your | and smoke it.

  3. I don't want to live in a bubble by jarle.aase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I definitely don't want my browser to spy on me. There are already too much of that going on.

    1. Re:I don't want to live in a bubble by sirsky · · Score: 2

      It's obvious who came up with this idea too. It certainly wasn't one of the developers thinking it would be "a good feature to add". It was some suit in an office that had this 'great idea', ran out and said "CODE THIS"!

  4. You know that this is a bad idea... by TWX · · Score: 2

    ...I mean, Avenue Q already told us what the Internet is for...

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  5. A revolutionary idea by pipatron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have a revolutiounary idea!

    How about giving users the ability to visit different "web sitez" or what you call them, depending on their interest?

    So for example, if I am interested in hockey, and live in Sweden, I could type in, say, "www.swehockey.se" in some sort of text input field in the browser.

    This way, you wouldn't actually have to send any information at all to some unknown third party!

    --
    c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  6. Kinda missin' the point, guys... by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The idea is that your history is used to generate a set of interests which you can then share voluntarily with websites, hopefully discouraging blanket tracking advertising systems love to do now.

    You guys just really don't fucking get it, do you?

    I don't want to make it easier for you to target me with ads. I don't want to share personal information with you. I don't want to give you yet another way to track me ("Oh, look, Mr. 18-25YO woodworking rugby-watching green-tea-drinking VI-using lesbian-fetishist on FireFox-17-with-Flash-11.101 has come back to the site!"). I don't want to "build a relationship" with you. I don't want to get your newsletter. I don't have the least interest in the viability of your business model outside the ad revenue you won't get from me. I will answer any obligatory signup questions with completely bogus info, though the throwaway email address I give you will at least work - Once.

    I will find you through Google. I will visit the pages on your site that I searched for in the first place. If you have a site that appeals to me in general, I may casually browse around for a while (though if I visited with a specific goal, probably not). I will block ads, cookies, most scripts, and tracking bugs the whole time.

    Have a nice day.

    1. Re:Kinda missin' the point, guys... by Seumas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly this. Why in the hell would I want to share my set of interests with other websites?

      I mean, I'm a middle aged American male. I like porn, videogames, and technology. That's hardly a secret and I don't care that some people know it -- but there's something sort of gross about just handing it over to some entity so they can better monetize me. Especially when I'm just old enough to still remember a time when people did shit on the internet for the sake of doing it or even back in the BBS days when sysops would pay tons of money and spend tons of their own time building communities and services just for the sake of helping people and offering services. Money be damned.

      Now, every mommy-blogger and twitter-user absolutely has to plaster ads everywhere and make two pennies off the twelve people that visit their blog every few weeks.

      I'm all about capitalism and competition surfacing from the free marketplace . . . and if your service has value to me, I'll be glad to pay a little for it if you give me a the option . . . but there is just something particularly off-putting about constantly being eye-spammed and tracked (or not, even) and monetized every second you are online.

  7. Great idea by Dishwasha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think it's absolutely awesome that Mozilla is helping websites to target me to only my stated interests. This will ensure that I can never be exposed to any other thoughts or ideas outside of my narrow viewpoints and will make sure that I never develop any new interests.

  8. Re:time for sudo by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    error: package could not be found

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    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  9. A tool to make people more insular by __aasehi2499 · · Score: 2

    Is not a good thing. We are supposed to branch out and see different perspectives and have new experiences. We don't need any help in finding the things we know we are interested in and know a lot about. We need help in finding information that we are totally unaware of.

  10. NO! by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I remember times when I wanted to download some apps and drivers for a broken PC. I was using a Mac to get them. The website refused to allow me to download them, because I was using a Mac, therefore I would only want the OSX apps, and didn't need that driver. I ended up having to grab another PC to get the files I needed. That was just a simple act of determining what I needed by what browser I was using. Only it was completely wrong.

    I don't want a personalized experience. I want to see and get what I need. And I don't need some website determining for me what I need.

    I really, really don't need nor want personalized ads for things that I have already bought.

    I have an idea - how about Firefaux adding a "I can haz Leave me teh Hell alone!" option that is the default? Then if we want some website to know that we have an obsession with Goatse and the PowerPuff Girls cartoons, we can let them have that knowledge, and can receive ads for Depends, laxatives, and Kidz Bop music CDs to improve our browsing experience.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  11. This will kill FF for me by pesho · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The reason I go to the web is to find _new_ information. Having my browser railroad me into certain website, because of what some algorithm perceived to be my interest is defying the purpose of web browsing. What happened to discovering things you never heard of, developing new interests and broadening you horizons? Wasn't this one of the promises of the WWW? How did we even end up with the idea of using the vast sea if information at our disposal to make ourselves as narrow-minded as possible? I won't even comment on the breach of privacy that this entails. Many have already discussed it.

  12. Amazing by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 2

    Wow, now I can finally figure out what I am interested in! I never had any way of knowing this stuff before.

    --
    You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
  13. Crazy Ivan by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 2

    How about an automated browser session or even just a tab that randomly visits sites soley based on a well-crafted list of interests tailored such that they cut across the classic advertising pigeon holes to the point of providing untargetable or irrelevant profiles to advertisers ('where do I put a Rodeo Clown passionate about 18th century German opera and the taxonomy of Indonesian arboreal fungus?').

    At the very least, it would decrease their signal to noise ratio and serve up some mildly interesting adverts.