Google Analytics does it too, which makes approx. 85% of all web sites you visit.
adblock'd sites dont do it :)
Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * the timing functions you get from the browser are way too low resolution.* The JS time function returns epoch milliseconds, not seconds. At the scale of network latency (hundreds if not thousands of milliseconds), the lower order bits should be effectively uniformly distributed. Resolution isn't your problem, the number of usable bits per network call is.
The problem is that the JS engines in browsers rely on not-so-sophisticated APIs to get to their millisecond values. This means that yes, you do get time in milliseconds, but the value is only updated every 40 to 100 ms
I think some browsers on Windows are using QueryPerformanceCounter for timing, which has microsecond precision.
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mouse movements have been long used as a source of entropy in desktop applications.
Indeed. Putty's keygen thing has been using it for quite a long time for example
/dev/random too :) http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@c2.net/msg01708.htm...
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#24I'm not sure how often research papers reflect reality, but Bing may be doing this as well, according to this Microsoft Research paper: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_CursorBehavior_CHI11.pdf
This is a very good paper, but it seems to approach mouse tracking specifically from the search perspective. Perhaps not extremely pertinent, but still super interesting.
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#25http://www.ghostery.com/ prevents it
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#26Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#27Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#28According to the link, this is being used as a source of entropy to generate random numbers. Fascinating.
Aren't there a lot of patterns on how we interact with an interface?
For example, most people on facebook move their pointers to check their notifications/new messages/friend requests. Wouldn't that produce a lot of "not so random" random numbers?
(I am not looking to start a conversation on how random random numbers are, just curious on why they used this specific technique)
Re: Google +1 tracks mouse movements?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * the timing functions you get from the browser are way too low resolution.* The JS time function returns epoch milliseconds, not seconds. At the scale of network latency (hundreds if not thousands of milliseconds), the lower order bits should be effectively uniformly distributed. Resolution isn't your problem, the number of usable bits per network call is.
The problem is that the JS engines in browsers rely on not-so-sophisticated APIs to get to their millisecond values. This means that yes, you do get time in milliseconds, but the value is only updated every 40 to 100 ms
Perhaps not on modern on browsers. In Chromium on Linux, typing this in the dev console:
x=new Date().getTime(); for(j=0;j1311577733069 1311577733083 1311577733099