GESIS Surf: Open-Source Infrastructure for Privacy-Preserving Web Browsing Data Collection
Original title: GESIS Surf: An Open-Source Infrastructure for Privacy-Preserving Longitudinal Web Browsing Data Collection
GESIS Surf browser extension and backend enable large-scale, opt-in web behavioral data collection with built-in privacy controls.
GESIS Surf is a research infrastructure for large-scale longitudinal collection of web behavioral data in naturalistic environments. It consists of a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, a REST API backend, and a relational database. The system passively captures user interactions, page metadata, and full HTML snapshots within a hierarchical session model while enforcing privacy through strict opt-in participation, per-domain collection rules, and client-side data minimization.
- Browser extension for Chrome and Firefox
- Passive capture of interactions, metadata, and full page HTML
- Strict opt-in, per-domain rules, and client-side minimization
- Deployed with over 1,000 participants in academic panels
- Hierarchical session modeling for reproducible digital behavior analysis
- Products
- GESIS Surf
- Organizations
- GESIS
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgUnderstanding how people navigate digital media environments requires behavioral data beyond survey self-reports.
By Mario Alberto Ramirez · arxiv.org
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.