Prevention of abuse personal browsing history is possible

lecture.

Since his appointment at Radboud University Nijmegen Wessel Kraaij, extraordinary professor at the TNO Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (ICIS), has been urgently looking for co-experts on information retrieval at the university. ‘Building such a professional network should be possible in an automated way’, Kraaij believes. In the same way as he is going through the organization searching for colleagues skilled for solving his research questions, it should be possible for a search engine to do this job as well. ‘This would certainly be possible when a search engine is able to learn from my information requirements and has a better understanding of other users. Then the system will be able to automatically draw my attention to experts whose existence I could not have found out otherwise.’

Two issues
The paradox of internet: the explosive growth of information since the introduction of the first graphical browsers like Viola and Mosaic in 1993 – even accelerated by web 2.0 – has made that same information less and less accessible. In addition to that, it has become more and more difficult to verify the information's reliability. These two issues are the most interesting to a professor specializing in browsing information.

‘My chair is called ‘Information filtering and aggregation’. It is all about finding smart ways of selecting and combining information, activities that can be perfectly covered by the term

information foraging. For that reason we named our interfacultative collaboration ‘Information Foraging Lab’.’

Privacy questions
The chair ‘Information filtering and aggregation’ has been made part of the digital security group supervised by Prof. Bart Jacobs. This has been done as searching for  information leaves behind traces that can be used in good as well as evil ways. Traces of browsing history can be extremely useful to facilitate searching on the web. The countless number of hits retrieved by Google in response to a query could be much better organized as Google has more information about the web user.

‘In fact such facilities do already exist to a certain extent,’ says Kraaij. ‘But once I learnt about i-Google storing your personal search history, I switched it off immediately.’

After all, companies and authorities have come to love digital traces for their marketing or detection activities. Criminals have discovered the advantages of identity theft as well. So there is a significant field of tension between efficient ways of searching and sharing information on the one hand and securing privacy and anonymity on the other. At least for as long as there is a connection between search and identity data. ‘But there is no need to have these data linked’, Kraaij believes. ‘There are excellent architectural solutions available that offer the advantage of creating a personal profile without linking it to identity data. It is well possible to store your browsing history on a secured server or local drive.’

‘This USB-stick,’ says Kraaij, grabbing one out of his pocket, ‘has a capacity of sixteen gigabytes. Can be bought for a song nowadays. Look, now it contains my passwords. You can easily put it on your bunch of keys. In the future I may put a search profile or my personal network on it, which I can deploy for searching actions on the web without having to disclose my identity. Of course I am free to reveal it, which I may do if it's relevant for my purposes.’

‘In the perfect world it would be possible to make personal information more or less accessible with a simple click on a control button.  Unfortunately such a control button cannot yet be realized, but this concept can be approximated by means of discrete levels. In fact it's all about predetermining the sensitiveness of different types of personal information… So here it's ok for the world to know and this is intended for my colleagues whereas that is purely meant for my family.’