5 ms·

Btw it's worse that this. Most popular website are tracking your mouse movements and clicks on their website. It's called a user heatmap and it's meant to be u

Btw it's worse that this. Most popular website are tracking your mouse movements and clicks on their website. It's called a user heatmap and it's meant to be used to see what users are actually clicking on when they drop into your website i.e. everyone highlighted this word on you copy or stopped scrolling after this section that sort of thing. It's been happening for many years. If you don't want to give websites this data block javascript in your browser by default.

bennyp101 4y ago
I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to know where people are clicking most. Seems fairly sensible to figure out how to optimise the ui
- rchaud 4y ago
  Precisely. If anything, session recordings are one of the least invasive forms of tracking because they restrict data collection to what you do on the website you're visiting. They don't record information typed into forms, e.g. addresses, emails, CC numbers. Well, some don't record by default, with others you have to specify that manually. Either way, it's better than a Facebook or Twitter Like buttons that infest the web and connect your visits with that site to your Twitter/FB account.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Most software that does session recording also collect keyboard events.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people It is. Everything you do is being logged and categorized, and your automatically assigned device fingerprinted user UID (whether you've made an account or not), is associated to all of your actions. Those associations are then dumped into a data lake for data scientists to mine for marketing purposes, and to cross-reference your activities across other sites.
  - feoren 4y ago
    Much of what you describe is immoral and/or illegal in the EU. It's certainly not the case that every site is breaking the law this way. You can get 90% of the benefit of analytics with anonymized data.
- dave5104 4y ago
  > as long as it’s not tracking people I'm sure some sites don't do this, but plenty do. Check out FullStory. It's a drop-in Javascript snippet (aka accessible to any marketing/design folks) that records the DOM and rebuilds it as a playable video in their backend as if you were doing a screenshare and recording it. https://www.fullstory.com/ https://www.fullstory.com/
ramesh31 4y ago
>Most popular website are tracking your mouse movements and clicks on their website. It's called a user heatmap and it's meant to be used to see what users are actually clicking on when they drop into your website i.e. everyone highlighted this word on you copy or stopped scrolling after this section that sort of thing. It's even worse than this. They have full HD screen recordings of every single user session, including all values typed into any input field regardless of submission. I can pull up hundreds of thousands of unique user sessions right now and sit there watching everything they did on our sites, going back for years. Say it with me now: Every. Single. Interaction. With. Any. Computer. Is. Tracked.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  I had a serious moral dilemma when I was tasked with implementing that product for a client. it definitely crosses the digital tracking creepy line
  - XCSme 4y ago
    Customers are already video recorded in a real life shop, which not only provides analytical data but also contains their personal information (face, credit card, what they purchased, etc.). Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy?
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      No, but also recording customers is totally creepy, if you store that for later.
      - XCSme 4y ago
        Some shops do apply machine learning on recorded videos of customers to find out more info about how they navigate the store. As far as I remember, even electronic advertising panels have cameras and track how long people are looking at the ad and store the age/race of the person.
    - 4y ago
endemic 4y ago
Yeah, I knew about heatmaps, but my eyes were opened further by a product that my current company uses that can replay a user’s actions on the entire site — it’s like watching over their shoulder.
kornhole 4y ago
And forms in many pages are analyzing text and typing patterns as you type. This can actually be used to identify someone. I generally resort to typing everything into a notepad and then pasting when ready. Whonix resolves this, but my work on work computer is slowed down by this inefficient process.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kaeruct 4y ago
I know of hotjar, it's used in quite a few ecommerce sites. What other tools like it exist?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  FullStory is a competitor. We used it at a previous company. From a product design perspective, it was amazing to have that tool available, to see where users were running into problems with our application. From a privacy perspective, I can definitely see how it would freak someone out.
tmaly 4y ago
could a browser extension be used to scramble the movement and click events?

bennyp101 4y ago

I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to know where people are clicking most. Seems fairly sensible to figure out how to optimise the ui

rchaud 4y ago
Precisely. If anything, session recordings are one of the least invasive forms of tracking because they restrict data collection to what you do on the website you're visiting. They don't record information typed into forms, e.g. addresses, emails, CC numbers. Well, some don't record by default, with others you have to specify that manually. Either way, it's better than a Facebook or Twitter Like buttons that infest the web and connect your visits with that site to your Twitter/FB account.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Most software that does session recording also collect keyboard events.
ramesh31 4y ago
>I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people It is. Everything you do is being logged and categorized, and your automatically assigned device fingerprinted user UID (whether you've made an account or not), is associated to all of your actions. Those associations are then dumped into a data lake for data scientists to mine for marketing purposes, and to cross-reference your activities across other sites.
- feoren 4y ago
  Much of what you describe is immoral and/or illegal in the EU. It's certainly not the case that every site is breaking the law this way. You can get 90% of the benefit of analytics with anonymized data.
dave5104 4y ago
> as long as it’s not tracking people I'm sure some sites don't do this, but plenty do. Check out FullStory. It's a drop-in Javascript snippet (aka accessible to any marketing/design folks) that records the DOM and rebuilds it as a playable video in their backend as if you were doing a screenshare and recording it. https://www.fullstory.com/ https://www.fullstory.com/

ramesh31 4y ago

>Most popular website are tracking your mouse movements and clicks on their website. It's called a user heatmap and it's meant to be used to see what users are actually clicking on when they drop into your website i.e. everyone highlighted this word on you copy or stopped scrolling after this section that sort of thing. It's even worse than this. They have full HD screen recordings of every single user session, including all values typed into any input field regardless of submission. I can pull up hundreds of thousands of unique user sessions right now and sit there watching everything they did on our sites, going back for years. Say it with me now: Every. Single. Interaction. With. Any. Computer. Is. Tracked.

konfusinomicon 4y ago
I had a serious moral dilemma when I was tasked with implementing that product for a client. it definitely crosses the digital tracking creepy line
- XCSme 4y ago
  Customers are already video recorded in a real life shop, which not only provides analytical data but also contains their personal information (face, credit card, what they purchased, etc.). Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy?
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    No, but also recording customers is totally creepy, if you store that for later.
    - XCSme 4y ago
      Some shops do apply machine learning on recorded videos of customers to find out more info about how they navigate the store. As far as I remember, even electronic advertising panels have cameras and track how long people are looking at the ad and store the age/race of the person.
  - 4y ago

endemic 4y ago

Yeah, I knew about heatmaps, but my eyes were opened further by a product that my current company uses that can replay a user’s actions on the entire site — it’s like watching over their shoulder.

kornhole 4y ago

And forms in many pages are analyzing text and typing patterns as you type. This can actually be used to identify someone. I generally resort to typing everything into a notepad and then pasting when ready. Whonix resolves this, but my work on work computer is slowed down by this inefficient process.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kaeruct 4y ago

I know of hotjar, it's used in quite a few ecommerce sites. What other tools like it exist?

karaterobot 4y ago
FullStory is a competitor. We used it at a previous company. From a product design perspective, it was amazing to have that tool available, to see where users were running into problems with our application. From a privacy perspective, I can definitely see how it would freak someone out.

tmaly 4y ago

could a browser extension be used to scramble the movement and click events?