So, how does Peer work?

You may be wondering, behind the sleek black curves and dark beauty of Peer, what it's actually doing behind the scenes. In our FAQ entry about how Peer works we describe a rough process that starts with parceling data up, and sending it out to the cloud - but what does that actually mean?

As we surf the web a record of our internet history is kept by our browser. At the very least the browser stores the url, title and time of each page you visit. Some browsers such as Firefox 3 or Chrome actually store quite a bit more information; "links" between pages showing the path you take through the web, or the number of times you revisit a page.

Peer uses this history information from the browser and shares it within groups. First of all, let's be clear: Peer doesn't share secure (https) sites. We also do our best to avoid webmail and social network messaging by default, and support blacklists to try and catch all the rest that you don't want to get out.

Roughly every 10 to 15 minutes, for every active group you have Peer checks to see if you've visited enough new sites and produces a snapshot of your browsing history. What's in a snapshot? Really basic stuff - a list of url's and titles of pages you've visited, plus counts of the number of times you visited each page and the amount of time you spent there. That's all. Since this information may still be sensitive to you and the group, Peer then compresses and encrypts the snapshot and uploads it to the group's snapshot holding area on S3.

To get your groups browsing history Peer periodically polls for new snapshots from other members. This lazy sync happens in the background and keeps you up to date with the browsing history of your groups.

So that's Peer history sharing in a nutshell. We think it works fairly well but it can definitely be improved in terms of stability and efficiency. Help us improve it by testing Peer out! As always any feedback is welcome.