I've been — Web analytics from a user's point of view

摘要

In an increasingly networked society users are spending more and more time on online activities every day. This is enforced by the continuous migration of applications from local environments to web-based offerings. As a consequence the daily life of people and industries are already depending on the availability of online resources. Still end-user devices are not providing detailed insight in networked activities, but instead try to make data movement as transparent as possible for users. This attempt to hide network connections renders users incapable of tracking their online behaviour and of making informed decisions about using remote applications. In this paper we present a new framework for enabling users to collect information about their online activities with a focus on web browsing. A user's browsing history is enriched by information of WHOIS records from visited domains and IP-addresses. By combining it with geolocation information users are able to analyse and visualise the intensity of their online activities based on domains, networks, organisations, and countries. To the best of our knowledge this is the first framework providing the presented possibilities for users to collect, visualise, and analyse information about their online behaviour. For more insight into the capabilities we present a detailed analysis of four months of a user's online behaviour and conduct an extensive analysis of the infrastructure and domain ownership patterns we found.