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I agree with the privacy concern, but calling analytics software "malware" is too extreme. It isn't mining for bitcoins on your hardware, or encrypting your do
by SquareWheel 8y ago
I agree with the privacy concern, but calling analytics software "malware" is too extreme. It isn't mining for bitcoins on your hardware, or encrypting your documents to extort you.
Always using the most extreme terms just makes it easier to dismiss such views outright.
- hjek 8y agoI think it depends on how the software is used. A friend of mine got a suspicious tax returns email that had a link to a form asking for credit card information. Being careful and responsible, my friend of course asked me if the site looked legit before actually pressing 'submit'. Of course it was a scam site, and using session recording, they could very well have gotten my friend's credit card details without per pressing 'submit'. I think it's always the context that decides whether something is malware. Is a program that erases everything on your disk malware? Perhaps, but if it's a disk formatting tool and you asked it to do so, then it's not.
- SquareWheel 8y agoYes, that's a fair point and I agree with you on both examples.
- dceddia 8y agoIt's a good example, and something I often wonder about when I'm filling out a survey and give up part-way -- did they save the questions I had already answered? FWIW you probably wouldn't need something as powerful or blunt as session recording to pull this off, though. You'd only need to listen for keystrokes on the relevant input (with document.addEventListener or similar), and send them to the server as they're typed. Same with partially-filled surveys. IIRC Facebook got in some heat a while ago for sending the partially-typed messages up to the server and to the other chat participant.