The Accident: A Short Story

In 1992 Phillip Hallam-Baker and Tim Berners-Lee were developing HTTP. Phillip suggested a request header to record the URI of the linking-document, and "referer" (a spellcheck failure) was born. Servers now knew what site sent you their way.

In 1993 a young developer working on the Mosaic browser added support for inline images. Before this, images could only be linked from a page and viewed separately. Images from remote servers were supported as well, and requests for them would eventually include a referer header.

In 1994 Lou "solved" statelessness on the Web. Cookies could be set by a server, and would be returned to that server with future requests. Session IDs could move out of the URL path, and into a more convenient home. Like images and referer, cookies worked with third parties too.

In 1995 Netscape's Brendan Eich forever changed the Web by transforming the lowly browser into a robust development platform. Web Developers now had an easy-to-learn scripting language in the browser, and access to a growing wealth of APIs.

Each of these men forever changed the Web and World in many positive ways; we certainly owe them a great deal of gratitude for their incredible work.

But that isn't where the story ends…

There were unintended consequences. Tim, Phillip, Marc, Lou, and Brendan collectively created the potential for something sinister: Surveillance-Based Digital Advertising.

Ad Servers who have images loading across various domains could now effectively track visitors to those domains. Each image requested from the ad-server shared what website the user was visiting, as well as provided access to persisted, user-specific identifiers via cookies.

By 1996 the Web was witnessing the power of tracking-based digital advertising. John Danner's AdServer product could distinguish one user from another based on request headers, cookies, search terms, and more. NetGravity was soon purchased by an even hungrier competitor.

Kevin and Dwight formed DoubleClick in late 1995 and saw tremendous growth in 1996. Following their purchase of NetGravity, little stood in the way of continued growth. DoubleClick dominated the industry over the next decade until being bought by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion.

The story doesn't end here, but this thread will. Suffice it to say, this is where the battle over our data starts to get heated. I am proud to work on @brave, which aims to put the user back in control of their data and privacy. http://brave.com/download