IP: Privacy issue - Alexa/Netscape partnership

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 10:20:26 -0400
From: Bill Crosbie <crosbie () AESOP RUTGERS EDU>

Greetings, all.  Sorry to sound an alarm.  I try not to invoke "the sky is
falling" all that often, but I believe that this is an issue that you would
be interested in.

What appears below is a snippet from a C|Net article about the new
communicator and some first person interactions that I had with Bruce
Gilliat of Alexa at Web98 that relates to paragraph from the article.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reports/Reviews/NetCom4.5/ss02.html

The other half of Smart Browsing is somewhat less controversial. To view
sites similar to the one you're viewing, just click the new What's Related
button, and you get a drop-down menu of related links ranging from
related-product reviews to competing Web sites. The links are pulled from a
customized Alexa database, so the results are similar to those you'd find
with Alexa's IE plug-in. In an interesting move, Netscape recently
announced TuneUp for IE, an add-on that brings the entire Smart Browsing
system to Internet Explorer users.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Now my bone to pick.  The Alexa service determines its similar sites based
on the browsing habits of its users.  Users that willingly downloaded and
installed Alexa agreed to have that information sent back to the Alexa
database so that they could draw inferences from their browsing habits.
Each copy of Alexa has a unique serial number that identifies which Alexa
user is hitting which pages.  Bruce even told us about a time they took the
effort to look at the data that one serial number was sending back.  The
Alexa staff were able to determine that this individual was male, lived in
the DC area, was geting married in the next 2 weeks, was planning his
honeymoon and doing some shopping relating to these events.  It was to me
the scariest, most Orwellian tale of the net I have heard to date.  Even
though it was claimed that they don't match up a user to the serial number
it would be a fairly trivial task to do so if they chose.

When I asked Bruce directly about how this feature was implemented in
Netscape he indicated that the browsing habits of users in Netscape are
implicity sent back to Alexa for inclusion in the database.  No
authorization required apart from installing the browser.

Ok, so now there is a privacy issue and no privacy statement that is easily
accessible (that I could find, albeit in a hurry).  But from an academic
sense there is something that scares me even more - the issue of a herd
mentality.  

Just because 10000 people decide that going from this location to this
other location does not mean that there are many other interesting sites,
possibly with more cognitive authority about a subject, that should be
included in the database of related links.  It's like having every
high-school student turn in papers with their references from Time and
Newsweek.  Doesn't anyone else have anything to say about this material?
Why kvetch about this?  Because Bruce told us that if a user goes to a site
from off of what's related it re-enforces that strong tie between the sites
in the Alexa database.  Bingo - a self fulfilling prophecy.

I searched for some other information from netscape to the contrary, but
the What's Related feature has not made its way in to the Netscape on-line
help.  There are certainly serious implications in the partnership.  And
they are controversial.
<End Letter to C|Net>
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I would really appreciate your comments on the events as I have presented
them.   More correctly, my hope is that you have some information to the
contrary and I will find out that I have in some way misunderstood, and
that the privacy issue is not as great as I presently fear.

Thank you for your time.

Bill Crosbie
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Always dream and shoot higher        |      Bill Crosbie
 than you know you can do.            |      Multimedia Coordinator
 Don't bother just to be better than  |      Dept. of Animal Science
 your contemporaries or predecessors. |      Cook College/Rutgers Univ.
 Try to be better than yourself.      |      New Brunswick, NJ USA
                                      |      crosbie () aesop rutgers edu
      ~~William Faulkner~~            |      732-932-8495