What user information is exposed via a browser?
- by ipso
Is there a function or website that can collect and display ALL of the user information that can be obtained via a browser?
Background:
This of course does not account for the significant cross-reference abilities of large corporations to collate multiple sources and signals from users across various properties, but it's a first step.
Ghostery is just a great idea; to show people all of the surreptitious scripts that run on any given website. But what information is available – what is the total set of values stored – that those scripts can collect from?
If you login to a search engine and stay logged in but leave their tab, is that company still collecting your webpage viewing and activity from other tabs? Can past or future inputs to pages be captured – say comments on another website? What types of activities are stored as variables in the browser app that can be collected?
This is surely a highly complex question, given to countless user scenarios – but my whole point is to be able to cut through all that – and just show the total set of data available at any given point in time. Then you can A/B test and see what is available with in a fresh session with one tab open vs. the same webpage but with 12 tabs open, and a full day of history to boot.
(Latest Firefox & Chrome – on Win7, Win8 or Mint13 – although I'd like to think that won't make too much of a difference. Make assumptions. Simple is better.)
