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Exchanging bookmarks with others
We all have bookmarks in our web browser, some more some less, but most powerful thing about bookmarks is that they contain links to sites that which you found very useful in the past, so they are treasure trove of knowledge.
Another powerful aspect is that it makes searching the internet much faster and easier, especially if you have a lot of them.
googling out everything without any bookmarks and finding what you need would take a lot more time to browse the net ex. if you're after something specific.
I for instance have some 5,5K bookmarks which I've been collecting for over 10 years touching all sorts of interests, I cannot imagine my digital life without them.
Recently one idea popped into my mind...
I would like to expand my bookmarks empire, not by bookmarking new sites because it's a slow process, but rather by finding other people who would like to do the same, that is, finding people who would like to exchange bookmarks.
There are however some obstacles with that, even if you are able to find another person willing to exchange bookmarks with you.
First and foremost problem is privacy, a lot of bookmarks may identify you one way or the other, such as:
1. Your geographical location (for instance if you have bookmarks from your country)
2. Your browsing habits (types of bookmarks you have might reveal your interests and types of web pages you visit)
3. Links might contain "metadata" which may reveal additional information about your use of the webpages such as leading to your online profiles.
I'm not aware of any other privacy issues, but if you can think of any additional let me know.
In addition there should be some a priori agreement on how bookmarks are to be exchanged, for instance there is no need to exchange all of your bookmarks but rather only those which fall into a topic of interest of the other person which makes sense not only for desire to exchange them but also to exclude those which you consider private or not interesting.
This means one needs to have their bookmarks sorted into folders (in web browser).
So the bottom line is that there is a lot of advantages for sharing of bookmarks, it gives one the power to search the internet but there is a potential price to privacy which somehow should be settled.
What do you think how wise it would be to exchange bookmarks and how to deal with privacy issues?
What other privacy related problems which I didn't mention could arise?
In any case I'm interested to trade bookmarks but only after privacy issues are debated and solutions are found.
Last edited by zebal; 12 Jun 2023 at 10:25. Reason: change title