Aiding transparency on the Web
19
Oct
A second-generation tool, called Sunlight is being developed to enable 
greater transparency in the use of personal data on the Web.
Such as Web browsing is becoming easier day, and every day the corporate monitoring our emails and habits are more and more exploited, the tool developed in the Engineering Department of Columbia University, USA, is to prevent and warn how and when our data are being used..
According to Roxana Geambasu, scientist at Columbia and Data Science Institute, “The Web is like the Wild West,” where “there is no oversight of how our data is being collected, exchanged and used,” and falling into the wrong hands can be used against us.
According to Daniel Hsu, another researcher of the group, the tool is the first to analyze numerous inputs and outputs together to form hypotheses that are tested on a separate set of data selected from the original.In the end, each hypothesis, and its input and output is switched on, is classified for statistical and second confidence Hsu “We are trying to find a balance between statistical confidence and scale so that we can begin to see what is going on across the Web as a whole “.
The researchers set the texts from 119 Gmail accounts, and for more than a month last year, sent 300 messages with sensitive words in the subject line and email body, and found, for example, crossing words “unemployed” , “Jew” and “depressed” were used to stop trigger ads for “easy auto financing.”
The tool of course, does not solve these problems, only denounces the existence of these cases.
