Categories: InnovationResearch

Chrome Extension Allows Users To Share Browsing History With Friends And Public

New software has been created that lets web users share their browsing history with friends and the general public.

The system has been made by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who hope to collect information on the type of browsing data that big web companies such as Google currently collects and mines.

The researchers also hope that systems like theirs could inspire changes in the regulatory environment that would give web users more control over the type of data that is collected on them.

Eyebrowse

Called Eyebrowse, the system was presented in a paper last week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, in San Francisco.

The findings of the paper suggest that web users could find it “worth their while” to share data about their online activities.

“We thought of a pretty long list of specific applications of this data that were useful to the end user,” says David Karger, an MIT professor of electrical engineering.

“Awareness of where your friends are, the ability to run into them, the ability to go somewhere and discover that they were there before, and you may want to talk to them about this thing that you both saw. There’s the ability to discover what’s popular, in a very broad way. There’s collaborative filtering.”

Eyebrowse is made up of two parts: a dedicated website and an extension to Google’s Chrome Web browser.

The extension works by users adding specific URLs to a whitelist. User’s visits to pages on whitelisted sites are then recorded. Users can also turn Eyebrowse off with one click, enabling a ‘private’ mode.

A pull down list, which MIT claims resembles a Facebook-style news feed, also lets members of the Eyebrowse community see who else has visited the web pages, and use a chat window to talk to other Eyebrowse users.

Google has this interesting 50,000-foot view of the Internet, because they know all the clicks,” said Karger.

“Most people don’t. There are lots of interesting questions about social dynamics. What are Democrats reading? You can’t answer that question right now. There are things that the population as a whole would be interested in knowing, and also things that scholars would be interested in knowing.

“The trackers don’t give us a choice about what gets tracked,” he adds. “And I’d really like to demonstrate that giving people a choice has positive benefits. And maybe someday that will turn into legislation that says that people have the right to decide whether they get tracked or not, in certain circumstances. If people do buy into voluntary tracking, then maybe we don’t need involuntary tracking, and that would be pretty wonderful,” he said.

“But of course, it only works if people want to do it. So a lot of this paper was about understanding whether and how people want to do this.”

The researchers say that the product as potential, and they would eventually like to see Eyebrowse become a commercial product.

But there is potential, and I hope to eventually see it in a commercial product.”

Take our Google quiz here

Ben Sullivan

Ben covers web and technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft and their impact on the cloud computing industry, whilst also writing about data centre players and their increasing importance in Europe. He also covers future technologies such as drones, aerospace, science, and the effect of technology on the environment.

Recent Posts

Ericsson To Cut 1,200 Jobs in Sweden Amid ‘Challenging’ Market

Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson blamed “challenging mobile networks market” and “further volume contraction” for job…

20 hours ago

FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced To 25 Years In Prison For $8bn Fraud

Dramatic downfall. Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison for masterminding $8bn fraud that…

21 hours ago

Elon Musk Orders FSD Demo For Every Tesla US Sale

Fallout avoidance? Tesla buyers in the US must be shown how to use the FSD…

21 hours ago

Amazon Pumps Another $2.75 Billion Into Anthropic

Amazon completes its $4bn investment into AI firm Anthropic, after providing an additional $2.75bn in…

23 hours ago

The Sustainability of AI

While AI promises unparalleled efficiency, productivity, and innovation, questions regarding its environmental impact loom large.…

1 day ago