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The Locker Project Banks on Your Interest in Stalking Yourself Online

by Leila Brillson on February 4, 2011 at 03:05 PM

sing.ly logoGoogle follows you around the Web, analyzing your data in order to serve you perfectly tailored advertisements, and creeping out privacy advocates to the max. A new open-source program dubbed The Locker Project hopes to help you keep track of your digital footprints -- or "exhaust data" -- as you maneuver around online. Sing.ly, the startup behind the program, says that the idea is to stalk yourself like an intelligent advertiser, creating a landscape of your digital traversing.

Since the idea is open source, Sing.ly is hoping that developers will create apps that will allow users to interpret their own browsing habits, from social networking information to the amount of clicks users are making. By providing ways for citizens to monitor themselves, The Locker Project may empower users to take back their data. The program isn't fully operational yet, but Singly recently nabbed the O'Reilly Strata Conference's startup prize last week, so the project is well on its way.

Sing.ly, the company behind the open-source instant messaging project XMPP, appears to have a two-fold goal. The first is to help developers create apps that can make your life easier by using the "exhaust" data you emit. ReadWriteWeb gives examples of restaurant reservations based on your map searches, or a news stream that filters out items that have been already clicked. (Since this is open source, Sing.ly is banking on app aficionados to create relevant programs.)

The second goal is a bit more big-picture. The Locker Project aims to make a virtual "locker" of personal information, demonstrating to the Web public what it is they may be leaking. Once all of that data is in one place, The Locker Project hopes users can actively see what info they want to have "mined" by trackers like Google... or what they want to securely lock away. That assumes, naturally, that online privacy is something the general public can aptly manage, anyway.

Tags: DataMining, opensource, privacy, sing.ly, singly, TheLockerProject, top, web, xmpp

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