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I had an extension called Deeper History which I shut down out security/privacy concerns very similar to yours. The solution I came up with half worked. I used

I had an extension called Deeper History which I shut down out security/privacy concerns very similar to yours. The solution I came up with half worked. I used https://github.com/travist/jsencrypt https://github.com/travist/jsencrypt to encrypt the sensitive data before storing it in IndexedDB. The problem was I couldn't get it to work with public keys I created locally. According to jsencrypt's github it should be possible. If you could get it to work you could give security conscious people a way to safely cache stuff locally. Anyways if it would help to store user info on the client, I jut wanted to say there is a viable way forward on that. I have the code to chunk and encrypt stuff on the client if you're interested.

spenvo 11y ago
Thanks for sharing your approach. In the end, I decided the API results didn't need to be persisted in storage -- they get stored in a local variable and jettisoned with Javascript's garbage collection. My primary concern was: to-what scope did the data belong? (Check my other comments to see my dissatisfaction with Chrome's dev-doc's language on this topic.) I decided that the user history did not need to be precisely-known, so - my strategy here was to hash the url, cut the hash to a much shorter string (to increase likelihood of collisions), and then pad the shortened-hash with a random number of characters on either side, and concatenate that string to a large blob of text. The extension would then be able to perform an indexOf search on that blob to be reasonably sure that the user had been to that URL. This uses localStorage. (This keeps the extension from repeatedly querying commonly-visited URLs but also does not prove you were at any given URL since collisions are expected to happen.)
- alistproducer2 11y ago
  No problem. Nice work and good luck!
  - spenvo 11y ago
    Thanks! BTW, I love the idea behind your extension -- because Chrome's history search is almost always a frustrating let-down. Provided you can solve the privacy issue, I'd use it in a heartbeat. I'd also be very curious to see your final implementation
    - alistproducer2 11y ago
      Thanks. I'm currently spending my free time learning ML and strengthening up my math. I'm not sure I would want to commit to supporting DH again. Maybe one day though. When I shut it down, DH had ~5K users and supporting it was work then. Not to mention no employers really seemed to care about it so it kind of made me wonder what I was doing it for. I made no money and I had people hitting me up to fix this or that. Be careful what you wish for!

spenvo 11y ago

Thanks for sharing your approach. In the end, I decided the API results didn't need to be persisted in storage -- they get stored in a local variable and jettisoned with Javascript's garbage collection. My primary concern was: to-what scope did the data belong? (Check my other comments to see my dissatisfaction with Chrome's dev-doc's language on this topic.) I decided that the user history did not need to be precisely-known, so - my strategy here was to hash the url, cut the hash to a much shorter string (to increase likelihood of collisions), and then pad the shortened-hash with a random number of characters on either side, and concatenate that string to a large blob of text. The extension would then be able to perform an indexOf search on that blob to be reasonably sure that the user had been to that URL. This uses localStorage. (This keeps the extension from repeatedly querying commonly-visited URLs but also does not prove you were at any given URL since collisions are expected to happen.)

alistproducer2 11y ago
No problem. Nice work and good luck!
- spenvo 11y ago
  Thanks! BTW, I love the idea behind your extension -- because Chrome's history search is almost always a frustrating let-down. Provided you can solve the privacy issue, I'd use it in a heartbeat. I'd also be very curious to see your final implementation
  - alistproducer2 11y ago
    Thanks. I'm currently spending my free time learning ML and strengthening up my math. I'm not sure I would want to commit to supporting DH again. Maybe one day though. When I shut it down, DH had ~5K users and supporting it was work then. Not to mention no employers really seemed to care about it so it kind of made me wonder what I was doing it for. I made no money and I had people hitting me up to fix this or that. Be careful what you wish for!