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Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

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Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#101

Post by anthonybullard »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #72
gambiting wrote: post #70

I remember just few years ago there was an article here about a website tracking mouse movement to predict what the user will click and pre-loading the content in the background. It was seen as a huge improvement to the experience and the comments section was full of people saying how cool it is. But hey, now facebook is doing it, so it's suddenly the worst thing in the world?

There's a difference between pre-loading content to improve user experience, and tracking mouse movements to gather information about users that's then used to show them advertisements, or potentially track them across the web[0]. There's also the difference between announcing "hey, look at this cool tech we have to make the web faster!" vs "we are legally required to admit that we've been watching you like a hawk, f…

I can't speak to Facebook's intentions or policys(I don't use big blue app at all), but many sites use tools like Full story to discover bugs or watch a customers user journey to discover flows that aren't working well. Some portions of the page are automatically filtered(inputs with type=password), and the rest depends on the team being very thoughtful about marking sensitive portions of the screen as such.

It's a very manual process, but probably one of the most powerful tools for improving user experience I've ever seen. And typically for most businesses, you are keeping these sessions for 2 weeks or thirty days at most.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#102

Post by doubleunplussed »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #67
Rjevski wrote: post #49

Is there even anything left that Facebook doesn't track?

They claim they don’t record and track what you say. My spouse claims otherwise, saying she’s gotten hyper-specific advertising for medications that she’s discussed with her patients with the phone in the room.

Facebook didn't claim they don't record what you say.

They said very specifically they don't record what you say for advertising. It was specific enough that it almost seems an admission that they use it for something else.

However, there are plausible explanations for your spouse getting ads for things she's spoken with her phone in the room - for example, the patient googled the medication later or wrote about it on facebook, and facebook knows thay your spouse and the patient likely had a conversation based on location data showing that they walked down a hallway together.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#104

Post by danso »

StanAngeloff wrote: post #45

I'm not sure if this is actually how reCAPTCHA v2 works, but I've found moving my mouse and highlighting text immediately after ticking the box almost certainly passes the tests for human. I very rarely get asked to recognise images or pick X out of Y. When I don't do this, i.e., I don't move my mouse or highlight text on a page at random, I most certainly have to sit through a couple of screens of tests (I'm behind…

This is correct, mouse movement is one factor for Google's one-click Captcha:

https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-one-click-recaptcha/

> IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#105

Post by monkeynotes »

foobarchu wrote: post #99
benevol wrote: post #61

Lol @ the Facebook army astro-turfing the comment section. "But it's not nefarious..." "But everybody else is doing it too..." "It's not for surveillance, profiling and shadow profiling, pinky promise, trust us..."

"Everyone else is doing it" is totally a valid thing to point out here. It means that, while you can get up in arms about it, you need to get up in arms about the practice industry-wide, using the facebook name to make it sound worse than it is makes this either dishonest or ill-informed. It's a lot easier to get one company (or person) to stop a practice only they do than it is to get them to stop doing something th…

Not sure I agree, there is a difference between a private company that can collect covert private data on over 2/3 of the US population, and one that has access to a handful of users.

Facebook has ties to and influence over government, it is so big and far reaching that I feel it's right to be more concerned about FB doing something like this than other smaller players.

The scale of FB is what makes it a special case.

However, I think that the proper approach to something like this is educating users. Companies are gonna capture your mouse movements, it's not something we should legislate over, but users should be informed as to what it means to give companies like Facebook information about yourself.

Worrying about mouse movements when you freely send clear text messages to their data pile about your most intimate feelings and thoughts is ass-backwards.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#106

Post by princekolt »

monkeynotes wrote: post #100
princekolt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus: At least Instagram and Messenger will force you to enable the microphone to let you use the camera even if just to take pictures. Now I always take pictures from the Camera app and simply load it into the app instead of giving them permission to use the microphone.

Can apps with access to the camera simply record video and audio whenever they want, even while running in the background?

Yes. AVFoundation provides both a turn-key camera UI view and direct control to the camera and microphone.

Correction: Not in the background, but it could do it silently while the app is in the foreground.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#107

Post by mikosty »

vincentmarle wrote: post #84
kreetx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a noob question but doesn't the browser ask for permission to use the microphone? And hence: they can't really listen in if you haven't given it explicitly.

If you attempted to record a video once with the Facebook app, it then has the microphone permissions forever.

Is it like this in Android, iOS or both?

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#108

Post by code_duck »

bilbo0s wrote: post #85
code_duck wrote: post #59

I have always assumed that Facebook uses heat maps to track what is under your pointer. Doesn't every serious site do that to gauge user behavior, interest and interface utilization? I guess the difference is FB is putting it in an available data set along with everything else about consumers' individual lives. More interesting is "a patent held by the company states that the Facebook app uses voice recognition algor…

Like heat mapping a visual UI, there are a lot of people out there recording audio. However, I think that I disagree with you on whether or not sharing the data is important. If you are heat mapping me, like facebook and probably everyone else from Microsoft to CNN and FoxNews does, or you are recording me like everyone from Facebook to Samsung does, I'm sorry, I've got a problem with it. I don't care if you don't sh…

The difference is how the data is used and the whether it's associated with an individual's permanent personal data. If it's only gathered anonymously and used for internal UI improvement, that isn't objectionable. At the other extreme, association with a real-world individual enables many uses that are potentially harmful, such as unmasking those who legitimately prefer to be anonymous.

Edit: I wanted to add that I didn't intent to focus on whether the data is shared. I think FB having and using it is bad enough, especially if they're ubiquitous. Also, once anyone creates such data, other entities such as governments will seek to obtain it and likely do so eventually.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#109

Post by lightbyte »

andrewmackrodt wrote: post #35
sunseb wrote: post #10

This is beyond absurd. Why would you do that? What could go wrong? Is this a social network or spy agency?

Lots of websites you would not expect do this; it's not for spying on users but to improve the user experience. Being able to aggregate data or inspect individual sessions is a useful tool to learn how users navigate with a site. Keyboard keystrokes get captured too but the systems are intelligent enough to filter out passwords and payment details. I don't really like this form of monitoring either but I've seen it i…

Just because it may help out the company and you've seen others do it doesn't make it any less spying on your users.

It would also help out Facebook if someone sent them a daily minute-by-minute log of what I was doing. That doesn't mean they should go try and do it.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#110

Post by seba_dos1 »

gkya wrote: post #81
zimmund wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. (You can always open the browser inspector and check network traffic for each page or, if you are using Chrome, dive into chrome://net-internals/ )

Yes, certainly. But I don't have background programs that connect randomly, and I have observed this enough times that I can say this.

As somebody who worked in the past on a piece of software that generated heatmaps from cursor movements on websites, I can confirm that it's a very widespread thing. Well, it was ~5 years ago, so I'd guess it's even worse now.
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