Searsia
Web search; No tracking
Presented at the ISOC NL New Year 2018

A poem

• roses are red
  violets are blue
  in surveillance capitalism
  a poem reads you
   
  and shows you ads
  for flower shops
  and tracks your clicks
  and never stops
  ...

• @lifning@cybre.space

Why?

1. To improve the service

• 
• Google search

2. To show targeted advertisements

• 
• Vintage pain killer advertisement (1908)

Searsia

Query autocompletions considered harmful

• 
• C. Cadwalladr (2016) Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world. The Guardian. 11 December 2016.

Lawsuits over damaging autocompletions

• Lawsuit France (2010): "cnfdi arnaque"
• Lawsuit Italy (2011): "[name] truffatore"
• Lawsuit Germany (2012): "bettina wulff prostituierte"
• Lawsuit Japan (2012): a search shows crimes committed by a man with the same name...

• Google update (2013) filters offensive completions for person names.

Autocompletion Stereotypes

• P. Baker and A. Potts (2013). Why do White people have thin lips? Google and the perpetuation of stereotypes via auto-complete search forms. Critical Discourse Studies 10(2), 187–204.

• Google can produce suggested terms which could be viewed as racist, sexist or homophobic (...)
  Gay and black identities appeared to attract higher numbers of questions that were negatively stereotyping
   
  

Query recommendations without tracking

Experiment:

1. Autocompletions from web content

   anchor texts from the ClueWeb09 web crawl

2. Autocompletions from user data

   query log by Pass et al. (2006)

G. Pass, A. Chowdhury and C. Torgeson (2006) A Picture of Search. In:
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Scalable information systems (InfoScale), 1-7

Experimental results

• 
• http://searsia.org/blog/2017-03-18-query-suggestions-without-tracking-users/

Searsia

Query: car

Targeted advertisements by Searsia

• Based on the query, not on the person

• Local (proxied) banners and images

• No third party Javascript, Cookies, or web beacons

• No HTTP referrer with query terms

Affiliate programs and networks

• Connect to APIs of big affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon)

• Local search in data from affiliate networks (e.g. ShareASale)

• (Shows ads for charities if no results)

Check it out!

• http://searsia.org   (documentation)
• https://drsheetmusic.com   (example deployment)
• https://github.com/searsia   (source code)

Conclusion

• Autocompletions; No tracking

  Autocompletions based on anchor texts, not on people's queries.

• Targeted ads; No tracking

  Ads based on the search term, not on the person.

Acknowledgments

Thanks