CODEWITHSUNDEEP
webbrowser-history
Joe Morano
Joe Morano

Reputation: 1895

Is there a way to use a user's internet history to render a web page?

This is probably quite far-fetched, but I was wondering if there might happen to be any way that a website could render content on a page based on the recent web activity of the user?

For example, if the website sold clothing, and the user recently searched for gloves, then gloves would the first items on the home page.

This is assuming the webmaster has made no prior arrangements with Google or any other search engine, and the website never had a chance to give the user a cookie.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 78

Answers (1)

halfer
halfer

Reputation: 20487

If you mean their general browsing history, including other sites, then the answer is broadly no. You'd need to use JavaScript to search through some sort of browser history object, which is not permitted for privacy reasons. This would be the technical equivalent of walking into someone else's house undetected, in order to search through their postal mail and private papers.

There have been various browser hacks that have accidentally permitted this. One Firefox vulnerability allowed JavaScript to reset a link to a website URL and test its "visited colour" to see if the user had accessed it. Given that a browser can these days search through tens of thousands of addresses a minute, it was quite a privacy vulnerability.

The mechanism advertisers rely on is the ubiquity of a particular ad network around the web: if a computer is used to visit a number of unrelated sites and they all use the same ad partner, that partner can get a rough idea of the interests of the user(s) of that machine. In the case of search engines, it is likely that if you search for "gloves", that information is also sent to the engine's own ad network, to show you gloves in the ads of the subsequent sites you visit.

In theory it is possible that you (as a site owner) could make a JavaScript call to your ad partner to get some keywords associated with your current user, based on their activity history the ad network knows about. However, even though this data has been given "with permission" (in the loosest possible sense), there are still privacy issues, and ad networks may not be willing to risk it.

Of course, you can keep a record of user's searches on your own site, and modify the page accordingly. The privacy issues are much less severe here, since the user has entered their sartorial search terms on your site willingly, and is presumably wanting to see what gloves you have to offer them.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions