Section 23.1. Introduction

23.1. Introduction

Briefly, web bugs are invisible elements on a web page used to record the fact that the page was visited, and sometimes to communicate additional information about the user or computer doing the viewing. It can be pretty hard to say what the purpose of a particular web bug is without looking at the ultimate processing of the data that it helps gather, and Bugnosis doesn't even try. Rather, Bugnosis just helps to drive home this simple fact: the Web isn't just a glimmering, clickable newspaper. The Web watches you read.

Now, people who work on the production side of the Web already know this, and might even find it to be blazingly obvious. But for the majority of web users who aren't in the business of running web servers, this truthwhen remembered at allremains abstract. With Bugnosis installed, users see and hear the previously hidden bugs, and can look at the information that they transmit in order to form a concrete mental image of the process. So while Bugnosis performs privacy analysis, it ultimately contributes to awareness of how users are watched on the Web: a necessary prerequisite to any interest in exerting control over their own personally identifiable information.

In this chapter, we'll explain exactly what Bugnosis detects and how it communicates with the user, and along the way, we'll present some lessons we learned by constructing this Internet Explorer monitoring tool.