Mozilla Labs Experiment Distills Your History Into Interests 158
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.
Re:interesting take. (Score:4, 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.
Re:interesting take. (Score:3, 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.