Cookiecensus, what it is and what it wants to be

So far, trying to provide solutions to the controversial aspects of web cookie's technology, developers focused on building desktop tools enhancing users' control over cookies stored in their browser. Despite these tools do help individuals in avoiding being tracked without their consent, they don't provide functionalities for making more visible the auditing activities preformed by web sites and advertisers trough cookies. By collecting and aggregating in a publicly accessible database cookie information coming from several users, cookiecensus wants to survey the cookie population of the most crowded and banner infected sites on the web.

Platform overview

1. Trough a Firefox add-on, several users - while browsing the web - automatically send to the cookiecensus database information about the cookies they have received and the sites they where visiting when receiving them.
2. All the relevant information (name, sender host, expiring date, etc.) except the cookie content gets stored in the database and data-mined by the cookiecensus web application.
3. At this point, when a user browses a site listed in the database, the browser extension will contextually display in a side bar a "cookie map" of that site: a diagram of the different first and third party cookies generated trough the data submitted by all the users.
4. By knowing who are the third party web hosts sending cookies and tracking users on that specific site, the browser will be now capable of detecting suspect page elements, by simply relating their source to the source of the cookies displayed in the map

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Project's current state

At the moment, cookiecensus is still under development and works in single user mode. To survey cookie data, I developed a small and still uncomplete firefox extension that I will release soon. This web site provides a prototype of the two core functionalities of cookiecensus:

Track the trackers!

Track all the sites where cookies sent by a specific host (most often an adserver) have been found

Detect suspect elements in a webpage

See all first and third party cookies found on a specific web site and scan the current webpage for suspect elements ( direct-linked from hosts listed in the cookie map). The script is currently capable of detecting external javascript files, iframes, images and web bugs..

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Next steps

Since I am not very familiar with programming Firefox add'ons, I developed this prototype as a normal web application, at the moment offering to external users only the possibility to view the data that I surveyed. The plan is anyway to open the cookiecensus database to other users and to implement into the firefox extension not only the survey component (mostly done), but also the data display functionalities (the cookie map and the suspect scanning).

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Feedbacks and contributions

Before starting a new development cycle, I feel the need of collecting feedbacks and reactions from other people about both the concept and the technical realization of this project. If you find this project interesting and you would like to contribute with ideas, knowledge or code, please fell free to contact me here

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Acknowledgements

Cookiecensus is Andrea Fiore's graduation project for the two years Master of arts in Media Design at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam(NL). Ron Beckman, author of Cookie Safe- and several other cool Mozilla add-ons -, provided a crucial contribution sending me part of its working cookie-capturing code. PZI MD course staff has also privided great feedbacks and support over all the development process.

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