111–120 of 188 posts
If I'm interested in the content of a page, I either swipe the mouse off to the edge of the screen or put it on an area of whitespace so I can scroll with the scroll wheel.
The thought that people are hovering their pointers over stuff they're actively looking at strikes me as odd. Oh well.
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?
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…
Going after the largest offenders and making a big splash is more effective than doing nothing until you can get every company to simultaneously stop something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess mouse movements are a very good way to identify people across websites. It's also an efficient way to distinguish people from machines. Think about the click-only reCaptcha for example.
Change mouse brand to surreptitiously become another person without telling a single lie or changing any normal user data :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I can only assume that up until P developers could record both sound and video in the background. That's some scary shit.
[edit] Why isn't there a system level visual indication or audit trail of any camera or mic access? Surely this would be trivial to implement, you could even disable it if you just didn't give a toot about privacy at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Keyboard keystrokes get captured too but the systems are intelligent enough to filter out passwords and payment details. Citation needed. But i did not realize that before, so thank you very much for this information, i will desactivate js on every page with a password field from now on.
Our own prototype, from before I've actively joined that particular project, tested on some live website helpfully displayed all the content of some textarea of some request form that somebody started to fill in, but afterwards decided not to include some of the details. That was a big eye-opener for me that it's absolutely not a right thing to do. We have ended up implementing a debounced indicator "some typing activity is occurring right now on this field", but we still had to deal with feature requests about content collection.
Judging from quality of some of those competing solutions, I certainly wouldn't bet that they're "intelligent enough". Maybe in 75% of the most common cases, maybe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Change mouse brand to surreptitiously become another person without telling a single lie or changing any normal user data :)
It's about the pattern of movement, not the brand of mouse. Identity identification algorithms are more robust than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Furthermore, I don't believe that Google and Apple (well.. less Google, more Apple) are in cahoots with Facebook to give them a backdoor to device permissions.