Who on earth wants to share their web history?

Cyberclinic

In a recent episode of the excruciating but glorious new YouTubeseries featuring Alan Partridge, Mid Morning Matters, the self-absorbed Norfolk DJ conducts an obsequious interview with a localinternet entrepreneur. "We're all familiar with computerterminology," he says. "Cookies, download, clear cache, do notfilter results, clear history..." The awkward pause hanging in theair at the end of Alan's sentence nicely completes an alreadyresonant gag. Most people browsing the web are aware of the darksecrets stored in their browsing history, and many have experiencedthat nagging unease when you think someone might have accessed, isaccessing or is about to access the full, unexpurgated list. It'senough to make even Alan squirm.

We don't even have to be talking pornography or videos of extremeright-wing rallies. The browser history is, by its very nature, anintensely personal thing that reflects all manner of thoughts thatflit across our minds. For example, this morning I've played themusic video to "You Can Dance" by Gonzales about eight times; that'sbecause I think it's a great tune, but anyone exploring my browsinghistory might decide that it's because I like watching the bottomsof the girls in the video. It's not. I can't prove it, but it's not.Honest.

Our apparent unease at sharing this information makes theappearance of three new services explicitly designed to, er, shareyour web browsing data look a bit puzzling. The website dscover.meis already up and running; you sign up, install a browser plug-in,and as you cavort gaily across the internet your paper trail isdetailed in black and white for anyone who you might want to shareit with. The site gets around some of the several million privacyissues by recording only visits to websites that appear in theirrelatively benign whitelist - a list that you can add to. So yourvisits to The Independent, Wikipedia or YouTube, say, would beshared, while your visits to dating websites wouldn't.

Two other services, Sitesimon and Voyurl, are launchingimminently; Sitesimon prefers to use a blacklist, instead - ie, youspecify all the sites that you would rather weren't recorded. (Goodluck with keeping that up-to-date.) The question that immediatelyleaps to mind is: why on earth would anyone want to do this? Well,our growing propensity to share just about everything we're up toalmost makes this a natural extension of websites such asStumbleupon - the only difference is that we're passively ratherthan actively sharing specific things. Of course, merely glancing ata webpage doesn't automatically mean we give it our seal ofapproval, but the data collected by these sites could provideinteresting snapshots of what's popular online.

That data is, of course, valuable to the website, too. Building avivid picture of the kinds of things we're interested allows us tobe force-fed a bunch of personally tailored links to click on.Google already does it: if you use its web history feature atgoogle.com/history, your browsing habits are taken into accountevery time you perform a search, theoretically generating betterresults. Facebook does it, too: those navy-blue "like" buttons thatare strewn around the web these days double as a tracking tool forFacebook, which can subsequently dish up what it deems to beappropriate advertisements for us to be enticed by, or ignore.

The full details of our browsing history are like some goldenfleece. For years programmers have toyed with JavaScript code toattempt to "sniff" its contents - something that's only recentlybeen blocked in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome.But now we're being asked to just surrender it, and while it's anaudacious, barefaced request, at least dscover.me and itscompetitors are being upfront rather then burying it in four pagesof terms and conditions.

What's unclear is whether we'll buy into it. Services such asTimelope and Hooeey already had a crack at this years ago, and it'stelling that Timelope is dead and Hooeey looks dormant. Still. Neverunderestimate our new-found enthusiasm for letting people know whatwe're doing with our lives, he said, pondering whether to tweet whathe's about to have for lunch. (Poached eggs.)