Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

Post by bo1024 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

zimmund wrote: post #79

gkya wrote: post #33

I have a network meter on my xfce taskbar, and it shows uploads and downloads whenever I move my cursor on a website I view with a JS enabled browser. It's almost all of them.

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/ )

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

anthonybullard wrote: post #101

pavel_lishin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Post by forgottenpass » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

Post by gvb » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #103

Is there a more legitimate source for this announcement? Seems like HN has fallen prey to fake news.

Post by dirkgently » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #119

doubleunplussed wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still call maximum shenanigans on that whole concept. You'd think there'd be one hacker out there with a packet dump or disassembly of the application (yknow.. concrete evidence) rather than lame anecdotes that reek of confirmation bias. 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.