Social Computing Guide – Part A

The web browser has become one of the most important ways in which we use the Internet, often being our
starting point in accessing online networks or services. Because of its critical role in the link between user and
server, over time it has evolved to include an assortment of features to make use of this data stream in more
ways than we may be able to see on the surface in our routine use. One of the oldest and most important
developments is the HTTP cookie, or browser cookie, which is used to exchange data unseen while we browse
the Web. However, website and browser providers continue to build on this feature and design new alternatives
as our awareness and relationship to privacy changes to this day.

The concept of the browser cookie was created by Lou Montulli in 1994 for the Netscape browser, initially as a
means for websites to save users’ shopping carts without having to store every single user’s shopping data on
the website’s own server. The solution was to store this data instead on the user’s own computer with a unique
identifier, and to have the browser send this information to the website while the user is visiting it, as well as
downloading or updating cookies to the user’s storage. These blocks of data are now known as cookies, and
can generally be divided into two types: session and persistent. Session cookies are created and accessed for
as long as the browser is open, being stored in the computer’s random-access memory. This means that the
data is lost as soon as the browser is closed and will not affect future visits to the site. Persistent cookies are
saved to the user’s computer disk and contain an expiration date, remaining active until that date and able to
be accessed by the website which created it (Fiebrandt, 2018).
An important aspect of cookies is that only the web server which created the cookie can read the cookie back
from the user’s computer, which gives some level of protection against wide-ranging tracking and profiling.
However, advertisers work around this through embedded advertisements on a network of affiliated sites,
creating third-party persistent cookies, which can then be accessed on websites that didn’t create them.
Because these embedded advertisements belong to the advertiser’s own server, they are able to collate
browsing data from all the individual websites on its network, such as which websites a particular user visited,
which advertisements had been displayed on those sites, and whether the user had clicked on any. This
tracking was used to better target advertisements to each individual user (Mayer-Schönberger, 1998)

The pushback against the tracking facilitated by cookies gained public attention almost immediately, with early
measures to “completely block” certain categories of “those little pieces of code that advertisers love and
privacy lovers hate” (Kornblum, 1997). With growing public and legislative awareness of third party cookies into
the 2010s, web companies have begun to explore alternatives that achieve the same results for advertisers
while giving users a greater sense of anonymity. Facebook and Google have begun to design services which
place individual users into categories of identities and interests. Facebook makes use of the data created by
users of its social network to form these categories, while Google, similarly, is making use of its wide-reaching
browser, Google Chrome, to save browsing habits onto the user’s own disk which is then shared to advertisers
in a way limited by the user’s preferences (Fung, 2021). Large companies such as Google also stand to benefit
from creating an alternative standard to cookies as it allows them to better utilise their huge existing share of
web technology, such as browsers, phones, and online services, as well as their advantage in having the
power to process this data for advertisers. Third-party cookies are increasingly being disabled or blocked by
default by websites or browsers.

My ethnographic research involved interviewing 8 people, including three Design students and three STEM
students, focusing particularly on their preferences on ways to browse the Internet, as well as their existing
perception of tracking and data storage. Almost all users I interviewed generally only use one or two devices
for browsing the Internet, usually one desktop and one mobile device. A majority preferred using a browser
over specialised apps, often because of the convenience of multitasking that browsers afford. When asked
about their existing preconceptions on web features that they tend to avoid, almost all responded that they
avoid sites specifically with pop-up advertisements, as well as a majority who also avoid garish or suspicious
ads in general. One interviewee found reassurance in the safety of a website based on its number of users or
popularity among the general public, while two of the STEM students take note of the site’s SSL encryption
certificate to determine whether a site is safe to use. Asked on whether they regard client-side storage of
browsing data as useful or worth having, five said yes, while two didn’t have any opinion on it as they did not
know the nature of this data. The majority of ‘yes’ responses focused on the usefulness of browsing history,
autofill, and bookmarks as being useful for revisiting sites they need.
My approach to creating my Social Computing Guide was as a deconstruction of the Quantified Self
movement, trying to ground the essence of this emerging culture by turning it into a manual, tactile process,
playing into the idea explored by Neff (2017) that “the act of self-tracking itself may help people to make
changes”. My intent of addressing the issue of browser tracking through a tactile recording process was
informed by the examples of artists, brought up by Tonkinwise (2022), using the “metrification of ownership”
directly against the consumer system which broadly perpetuates it. By inviting the user to consciously take
note of web design and systems which are, by design, hidden in plain sight, my guide’s hope is to create a
pushback against the use of microtargeting to guide consumers into actions dictated by advertisers (Zuboff,
2020).

As well as moving away from the digitised collection of data characterising existing examples of Quantified Self
movements, the scope of my Guide is also limited to simply garnering awareness of your general susceptibility
to tracking through a small sample size. The limited scale and scope of my Guide hopes to make it more
effective in achieving the ‘haptic awareness’ described by Neff (2017) as a way of helping people connect with
their own data. The format hopes to appeal to the self-curiosity that has, for example, culturally ingrained
personality tests such as the MBTI (Menand, 2018), but in a way which rejects and satirises the
commodification that those products have evolved to sustain.

My Guide tries to recognise that not all stored data is detrimental to the user– as shown through my
ethnographic interviews, users of a wide range of backgrounds are conscious to some extent of the data that is
being stored, if not necessarily transmitted, and in some cases appreciate the usefulness of this data for their
own convenience. This means that the guide cannot simply aim to prevent all forms of browser tracking– for
one because it is so central to the function of the modern Internet– because some of this data is in a way an
extension of the self’s memory when online, similar to Floridi’s (2015) view of data as constituting a person.
Instead, my Guide’s hope is to invite the user to more consciously weigh up the benefits of storing different
kinds of data when they browse, as well as to keep track of data transmission that they may not be able to
control. By physically writing down their activities in their own terms, the user should be able to refer back to
their work later to draw conclusions.

Informed by Tonkinwise’s (2022) exploration of forms of gamification as a form of “behaviour steering design”
by rewarding certain actions, the design intent behind my Social Computing Guide is to gamify the awareness
of cookie tracking by creating an interactive publication taking design cues from role-playing games such as
Papers Please and Dungeons and Dragons. I try to create an analogue form of data visualisation, structured
around the familiar styling of the passport similar to the way the Dear Data project (Lubi & Posavec, 2015)
repurposed the format of the postcard into a data transmission medium. The publication consists of a
‘character sheet’ and a ‘logbook’, each formatted to provide a step-by-step link with a breakdown of the
systems behind browser cookies and tracking. Following the Guide would give the user a learning experience
regarding these subjects, while the filled-in Guide could potentially serve as a reference for the user’s future
use to keep track of what their algorithmic profiles may already contain. Users of this guide, through learning
about the way cookies interact with their Internet browsing habits, would then be equipped to change their
personality in the eyes of Internet algorithms with the quantised record of their own profile.
Bibliography
Fiebrandt, S. (2018, July 17). What are cookies? What are the differences between them (session vs.
persistent)?. Cisco.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/security/web-security-appliance/117925-technote-csc-00.html

Floridi, L. (2015). On Personal Data, Forgiveness, and the Right to Be Forgotten [Webinar]. Markkula Center
for Applied Ethics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVTu-0SfvzQ

Fung, B. (2021, March 9). 'Cookies' track your every move online. Now there's a fight over what should replace
them. CNN Business. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/09/tech/cookies-google-tracking/index.html

Kornblum, J. (1997, March 13). Browser users to watch cookies. CNet.

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C8770%2C00.html

Lubi, G. & Posavec, S. (2015). THE PROJECT— Dear Data. Dear Data. http://www.dear-data.com/theproject

Mayer-Schonberger, V. (1998). The Internet and Privacy Legislation: Cookies for a Treat? Computer Law &
Security Review, 14(3), 166-174. DOI: 10.1016/s0267-3649(98)80024-1

Menand, L. (2018, September 10). What Personality Tests Really Deliver. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/10/what-personality-tests-really-deliver

Neff, G. 2017, ‘Exploring the world of self-tracking: who wants our data and why?’, Oxford Internet Institute, 7
April, https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/exploring-the-world-of-self-tracking-who-wants-our-data-and-why/

Scott, T. (Creator). (2020). Why The Web Is Such A Mess. [YouTube video].

Tonkinwise, C. Online Lecture, “Dark Patterns: Digital Objects in Demand”, Wed 4 May 2022.

Tonkinwise, C. Online Lecture, “Interaction Design Justice”, Wed 11 May 2022.

Zuboff, S. 2020, ‘You Are Now Remotely Controlled’, New York Times (Opinion), 24 January 2020