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The cursor movement story seems to be a smokescreen to dilute the fact they're actually running an internet wide monitoring network, tracking users from site to
by 1Hz 12y ago
The cursor movement story seems to be a smokescreen to dilute the fact they're actually running an internet wide monitoring network, tracking users from site to site and building profiles on them.
- ifdefdebug 12y agoI tested it a few times in their demo trying hard to to funny things with the mouse pointer. Still I was asked to type in some text all the time. Then I logged into my gmail account and yes it worked. So you're probably right about that smoke screen and it has nothing to do at all with mouse movement. My fx browser deletes cookies at exit and my IP changes frequently and I think that's the true explanation for the outcome of my little test.
- gravity13 12y agoI was confused about all of this until I read your comment. Makes perfect sense now! Also makes me think that they can dump the whole charade and provide no security check at all, but that'd probably make the service-providers uncomfortable and they lose the user as a source of human-intelligence for classifying things on google image searches.
- echeese 12y agoI'm not sure where cursor movement was mentioned, other than the comments.
- ifdefdebug 12y agoI read it in the wired.com article about this also submitted to HN: "And [Vinay] Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot."
- Jgrubb 12y agoTo be fair, any service or site - Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, etc - that encourages your putting their code or widgets or whatever on your site is doing exactly that in addition to listing out which of your friends "like this".
- uptown 12y agoWhich is why Google Analytics is free for site operators.
- heroh 12y agoMakes perfect sense. This is Google's response to the Facebook 'Like' button [tracker]