Opportunities and Challenges Around a Tool for Social and Public Web Activity Tracking

Abstract

While the web contains many social websites, people are generally left in the dark about the activities of other people traversing the web as a whole. In this paper, we explore the potential benefits and privacy considerations around generating a real-time, publicly accessible stream of web activity where users can publish chosen parts of their web browsing data. Taking inspiration from social media systems, we describe individual benefits that can be unlocked by such sharing and that may incentivize users to publish aspects of their browsing. We ask whether and how these benefits outweigh potential costs in lost privacy. We conduct our study of public web activity sharing through scenario-based interviews and a field deployment of a tool for web activity sharing.