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In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove of personalization data sitting inside your visitor's browser history for deep personalization
by whyenot 17y ago
In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove of personalization data sitting inside your visitor's browser history for deep personalization experiences.
There is no discussion of the privacy issues, which seems like a huge omission. I wouldn't use this on a website unless you like playing with fire.
- angelbob 17y agoHe mentions it (very) briefly with the Audi example. But yeah, this is a bit terrifying. I hadn't thought about this trick before now, and I don't see how you could easily turn it off...
- Fixnum 17y agoSee http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800693 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800693 and associated link. Summary: To mitigate, either (a) tell your browser not to save any history, or (b) in Firefox, go to about:config and turn off layout.css.visited_links_enabled. (Chrome doesn't seem to have about:config ...) This should probably be the default ...
- akamaka 17y agoAgreed about making that the default. Another workable approach are keeping a full history graph, and only showing visited links on the site where you originally clicked on them. Or, the browser could highlight visited links in a way that can't be detected with JavaScript code. This isn't hard to fix, so obviously we just haven't been complaining loud enough.
- whyenot 17y agoHere is an example using history sniffing to guess the gender of a website visitor. http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/ http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h...
- warfangle 17y agoHeh; funnily enough, that scanner thinks I'm female...