For most of us, web browsers are an open window to the endless twists and turns of the internet. But these two-way dormers also allow the outside world to intrude, at times, sneakily into our privacy, record our every move on the web so as to understand our aspirations and influence our behaviour, not to talk of simply infecting our machines, by pure desire to harm or to sell us a cleaning solution.
Adtech specialists have at their disposal a whole arsenal of techniques to track us discreetly. From cookies, small text files stored on our computers, to extensions that we are asked to install to expand our browsers’ functionalities through a bunch of malicious software.
During our digital wanderings, we are tracked at every occasion. At the least interaction, we are tagged in countless CRM databases. Publishers share the outcome of their harvest during a big data fair and enrich them with a network of partners with ethereal denominations: Acxiom, Oracle (Datalogix / BlueKai), Epsilon, Clearbit .. and an obsession to always provide a more accurate profile for each user.
The real identity is ultimately of little importance. All our profiles can remain “anonymous”. What matters is to decipher our personality, our behaviour, our past and future, to deduce from this profile the range of our intentions to sell us everything that consumerism can invent from physical to non-physical products. Browsers are big behaviour fishing nets with invisible mesh.
So, this is not a harmless window naively opened to the idyllic landscapes of the worldwide web. Today, clicking on the panel of your navigator is like opening Pandora’s box. We know where it starts (often on Google.com) but we do not know where all this could lead us to, until full exposure.
We have the tendency to believe that it can be otherwise, that a browser can regain its original function by protecting you from all the perversions of marketing engineering. This is the goal of URbrowser, which gives you control over the information you agree to share as you browse. Re-discover the pleasure of surfing the web without the fear of your data being resold per kilo to any charlatan by traders of all kinds. URbrowser is your browser, on your terms.
