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I work at Hotjar and love it that you're getting value out of the product! We do try to not record bots that advertise known user agents, like Google, Bing and
by vasco 6y ago
I work at Hotjar and love it that you're getting value out of the product! We do try to not record bots that advertise known user agents, like Google, Bing and other common ones. Reasoning being that recording non-humans will usually not tell you much about how your UX is optimized for humans.
It's really interesting that somehow the fact that we recorded these less known user agent bots actually made the product more useful for you and you were able to detect fraud going on.
- picodguyo 6y agoI promise I'm not a shill, but yes I do indeed love HotJar and find it essential for getting new sites off the ground. I've uncovered countless UX improvements by watching HotJar recordings. And thanks for your generous free tier!
- AlexandrB 6y agoI wonder what your users would think of the fact that their every click was being recorded. I suspect the reason most people are not worried about this kind of stuff is that they're not aware how creepy it actually is.
- picodguyo 6y agoI can respect that some people find it creepy, and I personally use AdBlock, which blocks HotJar as others mentioned. That said, I find a tool that records anonymous sessions detached from any sort of PII or even IP address much less offensive than something like Google Analytics, social login, or literally any advertising pixel.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhat matters is consent.
- beervirus 6y agoSounds creepy af. It's stuff like this that makes me keep javascript disabled whenever possible.
- drdeca 6y agoOn the one hand, I agree that the capability is concerning, but if it only records the behavior within a single visit and doesn't correlate it with an account, or across multiple visits, or across websites at all, I think that that probably wouldn't be much of an issue, for me at least. However, I don't see a way to allow that without also making the aforementioned unwanted connections also possible.
- lmkg 6y agoHere's the documentation for passing a user identifier to Hotjar: https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033640653-Identify-API-Reference#handling_user_ids https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033640653-Ident... This is a bit better than it used to be. At one point the documentation had a field for User Email Address, and only a footnote in some documentation suggested it be hashed. Still, for a company that chooses to use the feature, the session recording can be tied back to the user account and any data already associated with it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- echlebek 6y agoFunny you should say that, I just blacklisted hotjar this morning in noscript!
- mike_d 6y agoCan I do the opposite and only record events from known bots to determine their level of interactivity? I sometimes buy fraudulent ad traffic and point it ad landing pages that should drive away humans, trying to fingerprint anything that sticks around. I'd be very interested in tracking bots that actually send you events.