MIT's Eyebrowse To Rank and Review Internet Sites, While Retaining Privacy (thestack.com) 28
An anonymous reader writes: MIT has launched a new scheme whereby participating users can voluntarily share data on their website viewing habits, via the use of a Google Chrome extension and by signing up to an MIT website. The scheme, called Eyebrowse, began development in 2010 and has been in closed beta for the last 18 months. Cornell information science professor Mor Naaman says of the project: "Data has traditionally been used by anyone from corporations to the government...but the goal of this system is to make the data more useful for the individuals themselves, to give them more control, and to make it more useful to communities."
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What the fuck are you talking about?
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That's a good question and the AC has not returned to tell you. I'm a bit curious as to why they'd say such a thing. I might be a bit biased but I'm just not seeing any real reason to complain about MIT. Well, not any major reasons. They're pretty aggressive with asking alumni for financial assistance but I'm told that's common - except MIT is pretty damned spamy about it. I sent them a bunch when I sold, they've been begging ever since. *sighs* It works more often than it probably should.
I don't have anyth
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That's every single institution of higher education in the nation. I got my bachelor's, master's and PhD from three different joints, and there's something in my mail or email every other day.
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Now that has to get annoying after a while. I donated a sizable amount when I sold and they've been begging ever since. I get much, much more email from them than I did prior - though I don't think I signed up for anything new and the volume of snail mail is much greater. I do get the newsletter, and I did before, but now I get more than just the newsletter. I can unsubscribe to that but I'm not sure if that will take care of the rest - those don't have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom.
I think that means
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My PhD is in English Literature, so I only tell females that I'm a doctor. Usually, I just give my status as "over-educated".
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Oh, I learned to *never* introduce myself as "Doctor KGIII" anywhere. That's why I said, "When people introduce me as Doctor ..." My ego isn't that frail. At first, I only tried it because I figured it was shorter to say, "Doctor KGIII." I figured I'd not have to explain it and repeat myself. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.
The questions about practicum, internship, and clinical were disorienting. One of my first, non-alumni, experiences using the title resulted in myriad questions on those very subject
Biased results (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biased results (Score:4, Funny)
Feature, not a bug.
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Opera, Vivaldi, and (I think) most browsers based on Chromium use the same extensions so it may work with other browsers but probably isn't directly supported. I don't imagine there will be much problem using it with any of them unless it has Chrome-specific hooks that I'm unaware of. For example, I've yet to find any extension for Chrome that did not also work with Opera.
I used to need an extension to import them easily but I could always unpack them, enter developer mode, and add them that way. The Opera
Closed beta? (Score:1)
Maybe I'm out of date, but isn't that an alpha?
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The difference between an alpha and a beta is that a beta is feature complete.
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Are you calling Windows 10 feature complete? ;)
Laugh (Score:2)
"but the goal of this system is to make the data more useful for the individuals themselves, to give them more control, and to make it more useful to communities."
That may or may not be his intention, but once out ti will be used for... "whatever".
Help us build it! (Score:3, Informative)
Eyebrowse is open source---at https://github.com/haystack/ey... [github.com] --- and that we'd love your help making it better.
I'll also correct a few inaccuracies in the title of the post
* it won't let you rank or review sites (yet)
* Rather than unyieldingly "privacy preserving" our idea is to let *you* decide what parts of your web activity you want to share. Many people would like to have a more social experience on the web, for the same reason that people like to go outside, run into friends, and see where crowds are gathering. But we argue that you, rather than the tracking agencies, should be in charge of deciding which parts of your activity should be visible.
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> people like to go outside
You do know where you are, right? ;-)
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- our only travels: from the basement to the fridge and back
- our only desire: more of that nerdy crap
- our only girlfriends: a set of nicely shaped pixels
This is who we are!
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* Rather than unyieldingly "privacy preserving" our idea is to let *you* decide what parts of your web activity you want to share. Many people would like to have a more social experience on the web, for the same reason that people like to go outside, run into friends, and see where crowds are gathering. But we argue that you, rather than the tracking agencies, should be in charge of deciding which parts of your activity should be visible.
I agree that any unyielding stance is no good. Yes, I also agree that letting the user decide is a good thing. However, the problem comes with reasonable defaults. Most users are not savvy enough (myself included) to know what data is being shared by default. For instance, after reading this headline I would have imagined that there would be a significant amount of privacy protection enabled from the start. Making reasonably safe defaults and adding reasonable, clear, concise warnings is really hard but rea
Retaining Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
The "retaining privacy" part of the posting's title only refers to the ability to prevent some websites to be listed. Everything else is public. From the FAQ [mit.edu]:
Eyebrowse only collects data from the domains that you give it permission to collect. ...
Yes. ....
From every visit that is collected from Eyebrowse, we collect the time you entered the page and the time you leave the page. From the webpage, we store the url, [....] . Finally, the visit is associated with your Eyebrowse account. ...
They specifically warn that even an anonymous eyebrowse account can be potentially tracked back to a user by his browsing behaviour. It appears the title of the posting promises more than the mechanism keeps. No wonder for a webservice promising to get you in touch with like-minded (or -browsing) people.