Websites are waiting to take browsers' life public

Sharing and communicating are essential components of being human. But as celebrities like Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen have shown us lately, there is such a thing as over-sharing.

Still a new generation of Web sites like Dscover .me, Sitesimon.com and Voyurl.com is banking on our willingness to take that next step toward taking our lives public: namely, by automatically tracking personal browsing histories for public viewing.

Paul Jones, a founder of Dscover.me, said he and his founding partner conceived the site because they were old college friends and wanted a way to better share common interests, from shopping finds to tech news, while living in different parts of the country.

At times, their communication would drop off, Jones said. “Then, at one point we just said to each other, ‘What if we could just show each other what we’re reading and watching and shopping for?’. ”But are these sites another crack in the eroding wall between public and private life? Perhaps. The better question: Do we actually care if they are? As Jones noted, Facebook’s News Feed, the feature that lets users easily track friends’ activity in one place, was somewhat controversial when it was introduced in 2006.

“Obviously, now, it’s completely accepted and people who are younger, in particular, just accept it that their lives are completely open,” Jones said. (The jury is still assembling for these sites: Dscover.me has been open to everyone since November; Sitesimon and Voyurl are accepting users on a rolling basis, but will open fully in the coming months.)


Controversy is, of course, part of the appeal. Sharing feels a little risky, and entire Nevada cities are built atop the inescapable truth that risk can be fun. On the consumer end, it’s also fun to spy and is a great way to find content and see what’s trending. Yet it’s hard to imagine anyone choosing to share one’s entire browsing history. There are the obvious “me time” indulgences that want hiding. But what about researching an embarrassing ailment? What about online dating, or banking?

At all of these tracking sites, developers say they take privacy very seriously; their success will ultimately be predicated on trust. Therefore, they have created numerous safeguards. None of them share links to secure sites, for example; tracking software can be turned off at will.

Dscover.me has what’s called a “white list” among its protections. As people browse, only links to an evolving list of approved sites are shared. Steven Gutentag, a founder of Sitesimon, said his team decided to take the opposite approach: His site uses the more familiar black list to protect its users from over-sharing. It’s not just a matter of logistics. Gutentag said his choice was more philosophical.

“A lot of discoveries as we go through the Web are serendipitous,” he said. “You visit the same couple of sites in general, but then you click off and go to another one. You don’t want to have to add that to the white list for that to be shared.” All that sharing can open up new and tricky fields of interplay in relationships.

Mina Tsay, a communications professor at Boston University who studies the psychological and social effects of media, said that in her studies of Facebook she found that frequent users saw the world as significantly more public than less-frequent users did, a source of misunderstanding familiar to many social media users.

Privacy notwithstanding, Dr Tsay said social media’s evolution might create more-passive consumers of information: people too reliant on others to decide what’s interesting, stylish or valuable. “In some ways, this might produce a society in which we end up conforming to buying the same products, seeing the same information, going on the same trip, depending on the same sources,” she said.

Others argue that such sites will make us less passive by making us more aware of how we behave online. Adam Leibsohn, founder of Voyurl, whose playfully sinful slogan is “It’s OK to look,” said that is a good thing, especially because other sites already track browsing habits to sell as marketing data.
Disclaimer: All information on this news has been compiled from their respective official websites or through public domain sites and leading newspapers. Although, we have taken reasonable efforts to provide you with accurate information, but we assumes no responsibility for the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the Information and would advise you to verify it from the official product provider. We cannot guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct. If you would like to advertise on our site please contact us