Ten likes to know you. How about opened tabs?
While we had extensive studies about profiling people based on their likes, it seems like we haven’t looked into opened tabs status.
Obviously, we’ll never have a study about browsing history. Researchers for decades are looking for a cohort of people willing to share their browser history (ba dum tsss!).
Opened tabs — is it really a problem?
How many tabs do you have currently open? How many of them are open since July for instance? While you browse the internet it’s usually — based on other users declarations — between 5 and 30.
If you have chrome browser — or any chromium based like Edge — you can install extensions. Extensions can declare “tabs” permission in their manifesto (document defining how extension will use available resources and options). This small declaration of “tabs” gives you pretty interesting powers — I’ll cover in a next article — but even without it, each extension can read url page of any opened tab.
Harvesting URLs for profiling
According to a study from 2014 ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1418680112) it takes finite — and rather low — number of likes to know you better. It goes as follows:
- Coworkers: 10 likes
- Friends: 70 likes
- Parents or siblings: 150 likes
- Spouse: 300 likes
Is ten likes enough to profile you for ecommerce activities?
Maybe not — as they can be unrelated to purchase. Having your tabs urls for just a day and collecting a selection of your interests creates a much more interesting picture.
Here is a Statista graph about how much time we spend in front of a screen. (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-online-device/)
Difference between a Like and a browser URL
We don’t know how many browser extensions are collecting information about your browsing patterns but all of them easily can with no extra permissions. I know because I’m working on my own extensions and my concerns arise while I progress with my work.
But the difference in profiling between likes and urls is that you never know what content you get on social media and when you react. For a browser behaviour all visited sites — or at least most — are your conscious decision, something much more valuable. Why?
URLs tell more about you than Likes
Like I said, urls are more declarative and based on your behaviour. Here is a list of some arguments I collected about how extensions are better in harvesting users than likes.
- You invoke most of the actions,
- There are only handful of social media websites and only those companies have full access to data while number of extensions goes into dozens of thousands,
- You choose which media outlet to read in the morning — all it take sis to compare it with media bias index to know your political association,
- Your browsing patterns during the day reveal how you spend your time,
- Ecommerce history tells more about your interests than a random like
- People on average are visiting dozens of pages if not hundreds (130 per day in the US in 2007 according to this page https://kickstand.typepad.com/metamuse/2007/10/how-many-web-pa.html)
- Unlike likes, tabs inform it’s creators what you are willing to spend money on.
Why did we even look at it?
I hope I caught your attention. I’m Marcin and I do — with my co-founder — research and development of cybersec tools. We are working now on a project we call A-Irene — https://a-irene.com/ and we want to help people to use safer internet, with anomaly detection at the core of our venture.
End of part 1
The topic is one of my favourites recently and I’d like to continue writing about. Add me to your following list for more content around it.
About Me
Marcin Rybicki, former game developer, algorithm enthusiast.
I‘m working with my co-founder Rafał on an ambitious project called — A-Irene — unsupervised and easy to operate anomaly detection based on Machine Learning.
