The Incog Advisor

The Incog Advisor

 Introduction

With the advent of technology and the ever-going race of serving the best user experience and at the same time extract maximum profits, the websites have changed significantly within the last two decades. Using the http cookies, websites especially in the domains like e-commerce and travel booking, the businesses try to enrich the user experience for the good and the bad. However the cookies are mostly used by businesses for their own benefits rather than enriching the user experience.

There are three types of http  cookies: session, persistent, and third-party. 

For this blog, we are mainly interested looking at the third-party cookies.Third-party cookies, also referred to as tracking cookies, collect data based on user's online behavior. These third party cookies track user's interests, location, age, and search trends,etc. so that marketers can provide a user with custom advertisements.   

Issues:

1.Targeted Advertisements

Consider a scenario where you are booking your flight tickets from a place A to B. You do your research and visit multiple websites. After sometime you open your facebook and instagram and your feed is full of advertisements related to the flight tickets! That is something you do not want and is breaching your privacy by letting other websites know what were you searching. But these all is possible because of the those tiny little files called cookies residing in your browser and doing all this magic. 

2. Price Discrimination

Again consider the same scenario of flight tickets booking. Let say you are booking your flight tickets from A to B. Not getting the deal you wanted, you constantly keep on searching for the same query. It might happen that when you visit that ticket booking website again, it will show a higher price for the same search you did earlier!. Following is an image of a tweet by a user demonstrating the same:



Solution? The Incog Advisor!

The above mentioned problems can be solved/mitigated if the user tries to prevent the cookies from getting stored in the browser. This can be achieved if the user browses the website in an incognito/private mode which are provided by all the major browsers. The cookies are not always harmful and they pose the above mentioned risk to the users in only a subset of the websites.

As a solution to these problems, we have developed a chrome extension "The Incog Advisor" which will get installed on user's browser. Whenever a user will visit a website, our extension will check if the website belongs to any of the category that poses a risk to the user of getting price discriminated. If the current website qualifies as such a website, then our extension will nudge the user to open the website in an incognito mode. If the user confirms then the extension will open a new incognito window and open the website which user was visiting. As the user is surfing in an incognito mode, the third party cookies will not get saved in the user's browser, saving him/her from all of the issues discussed above. 

Also, most of the times users are unaware of the types of cookies that are being installed on their computers and are being used by the websites. For that we also added a feature in our extension which would tell all the cookies details used by the website and show it in a user friendly way.

Our Extension Nudging the user to open the website in Incognito Mode


Our Extension analyzing the cookies present on the webpage and explaining what each cookie does.


The Team:
Nisarg Sheth
Raman Shukla
Ashutosh Ranjan
Pujan Ghelani
Pratik Nashine

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