Eyebrowse

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Motivation

• Companies are capturing clickstreams
  • (without permission)
  • It must be valuable (to them)....
• Let's do it publicly
  • Provide that benefit for everyone
  • Make users more aware of clickstream capture
  • And put the shady web-spies out of business
• Create a web “outdoors” where you can
  • expect to see and be seen
  • bump into friends
  • people-watch
  • see what's attracting people
  • get a feel for the crowd's mood
  • discover hidden out-of-the-way sites
• Help scientists study mass web activity

Plan

• Build a public clickstream-logging server
• Let individuals choose what they want logged
• Give them an incentive to participate in logging
• Publish the logs to benefit individuals and science

Demo

Whitelist-based

• Blacklist are too risky
  People won't participate
• Whitelist downside: people forgetting to whitelist
  • Fix by nagging---“should I log this?”
  • But not too much
  • Over time, all regularly visited sites will be logged
• Another bootstrap: canonical whitelists, e.g. “News”

Why use this?

• Nanoblogging
  • Follow friends
  • See what interesting content they find
  • Even if they're too lazy to tweet it
• Serendipitous encounters
  • “Bump into a friend” who's visiting the same web page
  • chat with them about it
  • Make new friends by meeting people “on the same page”
• Collaborative Filtering
  • Help users find interesting content
  • By identifying users who browse like them
  • And recommending the pages those users like
• Publicly available log
  • Anyone can do analytics
  • Even across sites (which your Google Analytics can't)
  • “Open Street Map” of the web
  • Discover global popularity (Alexa)
• More....

Anonymity?

• No.
• We can't guarantee, so we don't try
• You don't have to use your real name
• But even if we hide identity, it can be reconstructed by log analysis
• Consequence: only “non-embarrassing” logged
  • Only get a slice of the universal log
  • But this is way better than nothing
  • And may even encourage prosocial behavior?
  • And will undercut the arguments of web spies that they need unfettered tracking

Incentive Design

• Hard to convince people to give something for nothing
• Why should I (work to) share my data with scientists?
• Answer 1: reduce work
• Answer 2: give benefit to user
• Data for scientists as a side effect

Please Sign Up!

http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/

• Logging Extensions for eyebrowse and chrome
• Follow specific users
• Or watch the firehose
• Near alpha release
• Non-harmful bugs (e.g. forgetting to log)
• Sign up now, get auto-updates

Help us code!

• https://github.com/haystack/eyebrowse-{server,firefox-ext,chrome-ext}

Fin.