Providing social data to websites on an opt-in basis

[g2010a]

Where I see potential for this project is in controlling the flow of
social information *to* a website.

Many users are concerned about how websites and advertisers track
their information to "better personalize their experience". Sometimes
the users wants that personalization, sometimes not. The following
data could be known by the browser and disclosed to the website/
advertiser as the user chooses:

Demography (gender, age)
Likes and interests
Favorite websites
Location(s) now or past
Access to social data from social media providers (i.e. a gatekeeper
to social conections)

So that, for example, a user can decide to always share demography and
interests on their favorite retail websites so their shopping
experience can be targeted, and deny this same information on others.

[Daniel Goodwin]

I agree with this idea and am working it into a demo I am building.

My thoughts are you can create buckets of information about yourself... for example, you might have created a bucket labeled "basic" that contains only your name and age (you created and populated the bucket). You may have another bucket that has all your information that you only share with certain sites, and any variety inbetween.

FF would provide sites with an API call to get the data, which would show a permission dialog. In the permission dialog, you can choose what bucket to share with the site.

In my demo, when it's done, you will see that I share my friend list with a site, and in turn, the site can see that a friend of mine was just there (because the site stored that information) and say "Hey, FRIENDNAME was just here!".

The real fun that I'm playing with, I think, comes when the site realizes that you and a friend (or friends) are on the page at the same time.

[Shane Caraveo]

You should take a look at the web activities addon (
https://github.com/mozilla/activities the features/detox branch ), which
is similar to web intents, both those systems are designed to handle
this kind of use case. Also, the older contacts addon done a couple
years ago specifically handles the contacts use case. The contacts
addon collected contacts from your various social networks, and provided
an api for websites to ask for contacts from you. If you're interested
in playing with that I'm happy to guide you in building the addon.

The use case of connecting with friends on a site are a hard one from a
privacy perspective. Do you really want to give a site a list of your
friends, do your friends want you to do that? I think the social addon
we're working on has some potential to turn that on it's head. Rather
than giving your friends list to a website, you can allow your preferred
social network know what site you're on, and the social network can make
that connection for you. You could potentially then let the site know
only which friends of yours have actually visited that site, perhaps
even only if your friends elect to let you do that.

best regards,
Shane

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[Daniel Goodwin]

I'll look into the activities addon when I can.

I understand that what I described is going to cause privacy concerns, but I do not want to let that distract my imagination. This is only an experiment, and if it points out bad ideas, I'm ok with that. Once you guys releases something for developers to play with, I'm content with just tinkering around.

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[Michael Hanson]

Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing we'd like to see as well.

Right now, the tools we have are fairly blunt - we have the "Do Not
Track" header to indicate a complete opt-out, and we are developing
the BrowserID login technology to simplify the authentication of users
into sites.

As the web evolves, selective disclosure to websites and advertisers
will be a critical job played by browsers (and other user agents).

Thanks for the great feedback.

-Mike

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