USC/ISI - browser history research project

Reads history, anonymizes domain components (example.com to yyyy.com), and compiles anonymized data for research project at USC.

This extension is used to support an ongoing research project at University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). This extension locally reads your browser history and anonymizes the components of the domain (for example, www.example.com to xxxx.yyyy.com), then compiles the anonymized domains and timestamps for manual (opt-in) submission. We are conducting a research study which involves studying web browsing histories to discover and understand its commonalities. Specifically, we are researching the distribution of website visits and commonalities of website visits across users to understand if sharing information about phishing targets will be effective. To protect the privacy of what you will share, this extension will anonymize your visited websites by cryptographically hashing it. (This means we will replace each website pathname component with an alphanumeric string that we cannot reverse, so we will not know either). Every website is specified by a URL, of which we will only record the domain. For each domain, we only keep the "generic" part of the domain (the right-most component), and cryptographically hash the other domain name components: `www.example.com` becomes `xxxx.yyyy.com` (xxxx and yyyy is a unique, fixed-length, non-reversible string as generated by a cryptographic hash function). Sometimes, we will keep the two right-most components (usc.edu, isi.edu, and generic second-level domains). At the end of the research study period, we request that you manually send us the snippet provided by the browser extension via Google Forms or email. All data comes directly from Chrome's browser History API, and no data is ever transmitted without your permission. ---- Research is approved by USC Institutional Review Board (IRB) #UP-19-00826. Additional information and a copy of this software and its source code can also be found at https://github.com/cardi/browser-history-research. Open source and licensed under GPLv3.