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>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

>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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    No, but also recording customers is totally creepy, if you store that for later.
    - XCSme 5y 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.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy? It's not anonymous and it's not just buttons. Furthermore it comes down to consent. I can see the cameras in the shop. I have no idea without doing network traffic analysis what kind of surveillance is happening on a website.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I wonder how they would feel if there was multiple hand-held cameras on them all the time...
    - XCSme 5y ago
      Well, that's technically legal in most places if it's in a public space.
Dave3of5 5y ago
It would be really inefficient to store this as a full HD video for thousands of users. If you store and mouse movements, scroll events, clicks ...etc and you know what the website looked like then you can replay these to produce something that looks like a video. The bonus points is that you can run mathematically analysis on the clickstream to get things like most clicked area and suchlike. It's actually the same data that's used in the heatmap just a different visualisation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- MacsHeadroom 5y ago
  > It would be really inefficient to store this as a full HD video for thousands of users. https://www.fullstory.com https://www.fullstory.com Most heat mapping services do not store such qualitative data because of the cost (e.g. hot jar). They opt instead to simply reproduce the "almost full story" by faking a video from the data. Services like fullstory are different.
  - Dave3of5 5y ago
    That's what I said ...

konfusinomicon 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  No, but also recording customers is totally creepy, if you store that for later.
  - XCSme 5y 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.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy? It's not anonymous and it's not just buttons. Furthermore it comes down to consent. I can see the cameras in the shop. I have no idea without doing network traffic analysis what kind of surveillance is happening on a website.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I wonder how they would feel if there was multiple hand-held cameras on them all the time...
  - XCSme 5y ago
    Well, that's technically legal in most places if it's in a public space.

Dave3of5 5y ago

It would be really inefficient to store this as a full HD video for thousands of users. If you store and mouse movements, scroll events, clicks ...etc and you know what the website looked like then you can replay these to produce something that looks like a video. The bonus points is that you can run mathematically analysis on the clickstream to get things like most clicked area and suchlike. It's actually the same data that's used in the heatmap just a different visualisation.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MacsHeadroom 5y ago
> It would be really inefficient to store this as a full HD video for thousands of users. https://www.fullstory.com https://www.fullstory.com Most heat mapping services do not store such qualitative data because of the cost (e.g. hot jar). They opt instead to simply reproduce the "almost full story" by faking a video from the data. Services like fullstory are different.
- Dave3of5 5y ago
  That's what I said ...