Hakuna Metadata – Exploring the browsing history
Metadata is data about data. In an e-mail, the data is the content of the e-mail and metadata is the information about the e-mail. So, it covers information like who is it from or who sent it, the date and time, the subject, network information etc. When we are browsing the internet, data is represented by the content of the websites that we visit, but the metadata are the website addresses (so-called “URLs”), the time of visit and the number of visits, network information, and so on.
Data is often considered to be sensitive, and it is possible to protect it using encryption technologies. However, metadata is generally not treated as sensitive, and is also very difficult to encrypt. For example, if we encrypt the sender information on an email, your email client would not know where to send it.
Metadata was not invented to help privacy invaders. It was intended to speed up the process of classification and indexing of any kind of bulk data, without looking at the data itself. By definition, metadata enforces data protection by letting someone process the data, without even looking at the content inside – sort of like an envelope in traditional postal services. However, metadata is also the fastest way to profile internet users – by analysing the number and nature of communications between different people, with particular websites, location, keywords. Although profiling based on metadata can be used for a number of purposes, the exploitation of its power for advertising and surveillance is its most common and controversial use.
Browsers store the browsing history to provide a more user-friendly browsing experience. By default, browsers store the history of all the previously visited websites, cached copy of the websites, form filling history, cookie information, and bookmarks. Depending on the operating system and the browser, this information will be stored in a specific location on the hard disk of your computer in a lightweight database. Browser history has its own advantage in terms of usability, such as automatic completion of previously visited URLs, and locally cached copies of the previously visited websites to boost up the browsing speed.
Who can access our metadata from browsing? Our browsing history is accessible to our browsers, which is why it is highly recommended to use open-source trustworthy browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, which protects and respects your privacy. If you are using other browsers from the companies that are themselves data brokers and advertisers, you end up giving away your browsing history to get tracked. Even when we can trust our browsers, there are other actors with access to our browsing history. Full access to our browsing history can be gained through a Wifi Hotspot, especially when using public hotspots, as well as because of a malware in the computer. Almost full access to your browsing history is available to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), even when the traffic is encrypted. Partial access is available to Domain Name Service (DNS) Providers, to different companies for tracking, advertising and profiling through cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc., and to websites that you visit.
In spite of the clear privacy implications, there is no clarity under the law about whether browsing history is to be protected as content or non-content metadata.
Hakuna Metadata, a project to analyse metadata by EDRi’s Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow Sid Rao shows how metadata can reveal a surprising scale of our daily interactions online. It is possible to learn about a person’s working hours, sleep time, work-related travel and holiday schedules, interests and other keywords related information, who their friends are and much more just by using their browsing metadata. You can read more about the project and the results of the analysis here and download the open source browsing history visualisation tool here.
Hakuna Metadata – Exploring the browsing history (28.03.2017)
http://www.privacypies.org/blog/metadata/2017/02/28/hakuna-metadata-1.html
Hakuna Metadata – Browsing history visualization for Linux + Firefox combo
https://github.com/sidtechnical/hakuna-metadata-1
Metadata Investigation: Inside Hacking Team (29.10.2015)
https://labs.rs/en/metadata/
(Contribution by Siddharth Rao, Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow, EDRi)