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Posts Tagged ‘privacy’

Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You’ll Want to Stream Your Browser History

18 Feb


At one point, e-mail was the best option for sharing something interesting online. Blog posts made it a bit easier, and 140-character Twitter messages have brought us into the age of near-effortless sharing.

Several startups are betting that there’s another (rather large) step to go before sharing content is as easy as it can be. Voyurl, Sitesimon, and Dscover.me have all launched platforms for automatically sharing your clickstream data, or browsing history, with friends.

The concept of automatic sharing feels counter-intuitive at a time when the U.S. Congress just introduced its first “Do Not Track” bill, but these startups are betting that shared clickstream data has an important role to play in the future of web browsing. We talked to each of them to get their perspective on how clickstream data could become the next sharing trend.


Dscover.Me: Put Recommendations in Context


Friends Paul Jones and Josh Payne started Dscover.Me while trying to stay in touch after college. Instead of sending each other interesting articles, they could just see what the other person was looking at and start their discussion there (Jones notes that this is also useful for long-distance relationships).

The site’s approach is different than that of Sitesimon and Voyurl in that it revolves around a white list of sites that a user shares, rather than a black list of sites that he does not want to share. A suggested white list that includes Wikipedia, YouTube, popular publications, retailers, and travel sites is provided. Users can see a stream of what their friends are looking at on white-listed friends and also see what the entire community is doing.

But that’s not entirely the point: “People enjoy seeing what are the popular articles in their community, but they don’t really care about seeing a stream of random people and what they’re checking out,” Jones says.

Eventually, Dscovr.Me will partner with web publishers to provide recommendations for users as they browse. For instance, if a user were on the New York Times website, he would be able to see which articles his friends looked at on that site with the highest priority given to the articles that the highest number of their friends looked at. The end goal is to help publishers keep people on their sites longer.

The next version will also take into account links being shared over the user’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and it will filter out any sites that the user has already visited.

“I think as long as there’s a limitation and the company that asks to track your information can demonstrate value back to you and say ‘OK, we tracked all of this information, but now you have a much better experience.’ Then clickstream sharing can catch on,” Jones says.


Sitesimon: Prove You Saw it First


Sitesimon, founded by three recent NYU grads, attempts to generate recommendations not only from friends, but from people who share your browsing habits. In the process, the site adds a competitive component to web browsing.

The original version of Sitesimon allows users to either select a list of sites that they were willing to share (white list) or to instead share everything by default but select the sites they aren’t comfortable sharing (black list). The next version will scratch the white list.

“As you’re browsing, we don’t want to have people create a white list because a lot of what is fun about clickstream sharing is discovery through your friends,” co-founder Steven Gutentag says. “And if your friends end up on a random fun site and it’s not white listed it’s not going to show up and it’s a hassle to do it.”

Right now, the site operates on a friending system. You see what your friends are browsing and vice versa. Other user data comes in to play when assigning each user a “site score” that measures influence. Your score improves when you see a webpage earlier than other Sitesimon users and when other people on Sitesimon view pages through your clickstream. Much as there is a cachet associated with being the first to submit an interesting webpage on Digg, Sitesimon’s founders are betting that giving people credit for discovering cool stuff on the web will attract users.

But they also want to leverage non-friend data in order to give users personalized recommendations based on others with similar browsing patterns. Gutentag compares it to the way that StumbleUpon learns what users like and don’t like as they spend more time using the service.

“Our dream is that we can offer up better recommendations for what you should be looking at than you’ve ever had before without you having to do any work, such as [StumbleUpon's] thumbs up and thumbs down — without changing how you browse normally,” Gutentag says.


Voyurl: Use Natural Behavior to Power Recommendations


Working in the ad industry, Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn occasionally hears stories about clickstream data collection methods that repulse him. Voyurl is a play on data collection that he feels good about.

“I wanted a place that was driven by data, but uses that data to provide value back to the consumer,” he says.

Voyurl’s current private beta site (which Mashable readers can check out any time in the next 36 hours by clicking here) gives users access to a feed of the community’s browsing data. They can follow other users to create a personalized feed or filter sites by categories that they’re interested in (Culture or Music, for instance). Any user can submit their data anonymously, and a “discover” feature gives recommendations based on their browsing habits and the browsing habits of their friends. People who are looking for great new sites can also browse top users, top URLs, top domains, and top categories.

Leibsohn considers sharing content this way to be more conducive to conversation. “When someone engages you about the content, they’ve already consumed it,” he says. “So the conversation skips ahead of ‘Look at this thing, consume this thing,’ and instead goes into discussing the merits of it one way or another and a substantial dialog actually comes out.”

Platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook all take pains to collect data. The problem, Leibsohn says, is that these platforms only have access to their own users. Clickstream data paints a fuller picture of online activity.

Voyurl is planning to somehow use this data in its business model (they won’t be selling it), but the startup is being a bit stealthy for now. “We intend to use data to make other services that people use way better,” Leibsohn says.


More Startup Resources from Mashable:


- How an Online Game Plans to Reward Kids for Playing Outside
- What We Need to Win the Entrepreneurial Race [OP-ED]
- 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
- 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups
- HOW TO: Land a Job at 9 Hot Startups

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, inkastudio

More About: browsing history, clickstream, dscover.me, privacy, sharing, sitesimon, startup, voyurl

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Facebook, the Control Revolution, and the Failure of Applied Modern Cryptography

14 Jan

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was widely assumed by most tech writers and thinkers, myself included, that the Internet was a “Control Revolution” (to use the words of Andrew Shapiro, author of a book with that very title in 1999). The Internet was going to put people in control, to enable buyers to work directly with sellers, to cut out the middle man. Why? Because the Internet makes communication and commerce vastly more efficient, obviating the need for a middle man to connect us.

Fast forward to 2011, and the world is vastly more centralized than it ever was. Almost everyone’s most intimate conversations are held by four companies. And one company knows basically everything about everyone under 25.

How did we get so giddy about the Internet that we didn’t see this coming? We missed an important detail: communication and commerce became vastly more efficient for everyone, including the would-be middle-men, the would be mediators. The Internet enabled economies of scale never before imagined. So while it is possible to host your own email server, it’s a lot easier to use gmail. While it’s possible to host your own web page, post your updates to your blog, subscribe to your friends’ RSS feeds hosted at different blogs, it’s a heck of a lot easier to use Facebook. The Internet put the 1990s middle-men out of business then enabled a new breed of data mediators that provide incredibly valuable services no individual user can dream of performing on their own: apply massively parallel facial recognition to billions of photos to find that one picture of you and your best friend’s grandmother, do deep graph analysis to find your long-lost friends and suggest you connect with them, learn how to filter spam messages so efficiently (thanks to training by billions of messages received on behalf of millions of users) that the spam wars are effectively over.

The Internet has been vastly more empowering to mediators than to individuals. And so we have, in fact, a Control Revolution of a very different nature: one company, namely Facebook, is effectively shaping the future of social interactions, what’s acceptable and what’s frowned upon, what’s private and what’s not.

I say this without any value judgment, purely as an observation. Facebook is making the rules, and when the rules change in Palo Alto, 550 million people follow.

The Failure of Applied Modern Cryptography

Cryptography in the 1980s was about secrecy, military codes, etc. I’m not talking about that.

Modern Cryptography is about individuals achieving a common goal without fully trusting one another. Think of a secret-bid auction. Or an election. Or two people discovering which friends they have in common without revealing the friends they don’t have in common. In all of these cases, people come together to accomplish a common result, but they cannot fully trust one another since their incentives are not perfectly aligned: I want to win the auction by bidding only one dollar more than you, Alice wants her candidate to beat yours, and Bob would like to find out which movie stars you’re friends with even though he knows none.

Modern cryptography teaches us how to accomplish these tasks without ever trusting a third party. That’s hard to imagine if you’re not steeped in the field. But that’s what modern cryptography does: take an interaction that is easily imaginable with the help of a trusted third party that deals with each individual, and replace the trusted third-party with a beautiful mathematical dance that achieves the same end-goal. No centralization of data in one big database, no trusted dealer/counter/connector, just individuals exchanging coded messages in a particular order and obtaining a trustworthy result. Cryptographers call this secure multi-party computation.

Modern Cryptography would, if properly implemented, give us all the functionality of Facebook without the aggregation of everyone’s data in a single data center. And we couldn’t be further from this world if we tried! We are headed for a world of increased data centralization and increased reliance on trusted third parties. Because they’re vastly more efficient, have economies of scale that allow them to provide features we didn’t dream of just a few years ago, and of course because the economic incentives of becoming that trusted third party are staggering.

As a privacy advocate, and again without value judgment, I can’t imagine a more surprising consequence of a technology that was meant to empower the little guy. It is, in a word, shocking.

 
 

These Apps Are Rampantly Stealing Your Info Without Permission [Privacy]

20 Dec
I love Pandora. I really couldn't do without it. But I could do without its sending my demographic information, phone ID, and location to eight trackers across six companies. And Pandora's far from the worst offender, the WSJ shows us. More »


 
 

Feds admit to storing tens of thousands of images from naked scanners – unknown number leaked back to manufacturer

09 Nov
You know those naked scanners that we're seeing at the airport that use backscatter radiation to show snoopy security staff high-resolution detailed images of your genitals, breasts, etc? The ones that aren't supposed to be storing those images from your personal involuntary porn shoot?

Well, the US Marshals have just copped to storing over 35,000 of these personal, private images taken from a single courthouse scanner in Florida.

What's more, another machine used in a DC courthouse was returned to the manufacturer with an unspecified number of naked images on its hard drive.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA's procurement specifications, classified as "sensitive security information," says that in some modes the scanner must "allow exporting of image data in real time" and provide a mechanism for "high-speed transfer of image data" over the network. (It also says that image filters will "protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.")

"TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices," Rotenberg said. "This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion--I think it's outrageous." EPIC's lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable" searches.

Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images (Thanks, Master Pokes!)