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Researchers from Columbia University have developed a system called XRay that aims to make why adverts appear on the web more transparent.
The researchers have developed XRay, a new tool that reveals which data in a web account, such as emails, searches, or viewed products, are being used to target which outputs, such as ads, recommended products, or prices. They will be presenting the prototype, which is designed to make the online use of personal data more transparent, at USENIX Security on August 20. The researchers have posted the open source system, as well as their findings, online for other researchers interested in studying how web services use personal data to leverage and extend.
“Today we have a problem: the web is not transparent. We see XRay as an important first step in exposing how websites are using your personal data,” says Geambasu, who is also a member of Columbia’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering’s Cybersecurity Center.
We live in a “big data” world, where staggering amounts of personal data—our locations, search histories, emails, posts, photos, and more—are constantly being collected and analyzed by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other web services. While harnessing big data can certainly improve our daily lives (Amazon offerings, Netflix suggestions, emergency response Tweets, etc.), these beneficial uses have also generated a big data frenzy, with web services aggressively pursuing new ways to acquire and commercialize the information.
“It’s critical, now more than ever, to reconcile our privacy needs with the exponential progress in leveraging this big data,” says Chaintreau, a member of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering’s New Media Center. Geambasu adds, “If we leave it unchecked, big data’s exciting potential could become a breeding ground for data abuses, privacy vulnerabilities, and unfair or deceptive business practices.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 20 2014, @02:37PM
That is actually a fantastic idea. Introduce noise in the system and then things you do that can be tracked despite your best efforts of add and script blocking, and it becomes difficult to see what anything about you.
Perhaps even create fake social media profiles and use those against sites with twitter and facebook script integration.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 20 2014, @05:42PM
The self-destructing cookies add-on [mozilla.org] is kind of like that.
It lets any site set cookies on your browser, but it deletes them a few seconds after you leave the site.
That gives you whatever useful functionality there might be in the cookie, like a login session but it causes the trackers to build a new profile each time you hit a new site or even return to the same site. It is far from perfect, but combine it with a VPN that lets you switch IP addresses and a user-agent spoofer that lets you pretend to be different browsers on different OSes (one hour you are using an Ipad, another hour you are using a WinXP box, the next hour it is a MacOS box, etc) and you end up injecting enough noise to make it hard to pin down your identity.