How to detect what other sites your visitors have been to

When someone visits your site, do you want to know where else they've been? Maybe you want to know if they've been to a competitor or affiliate site so you can make them special offers. Maybe you want to intelligently suggest they signup for your site with Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google OpenID, or Yahoo! ID, based on which of those sites you know they frequent. Maybe you're just nosy.

Regardless, there are pretty good controls in place with most browser to prevent you from developing javascript on your site that can sniff the user's browser history. There's one small loophole though...you can stick all the URLs you want to know about in your page, and test to see if they have been visited, using the CSS selector features of javascript frameworks such as jQuery and Prototype.js. This is not a fool-proof way to tell where they've been, but it might just be good enough for the kinds of suggestions you want to make to your user.

Based on ideas from Spyjax (described in this blog post), I whipped up a simpler demonstration of this using Haml to make a hidden list of URLs and, instead of trying to sniff links by their colors, using Prototype.js to detect which of them have been visited. This could have just as easily been done in jQuery:



One extension to this technique, if you have lots of URLs to test, might be to dynamically load 100 at a time via AJAX periodically, and asynchronously trigger actions in your page when visited URLs are detected.

Isn't that a little creepy? What if I don't want sites to get this info about me?

The Spyjax blog post linked to earlier has a decent answer for this:

The less browser history you store the fewer URLs someone can steal from that history. In Firefox you can change the amount of browser history by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and then either uncheck the “Remember visited pages” checkbox or change the number of days that history is stored for.