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Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

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Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#31

Post by Chilinot »

amelius wrote: post #30
Chilinot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably start with recording all of your mouse movements over a period of a month or so. Record speed, acceleration, how straight each move is, how much each move deviates from a straight line, how many times the mouse movement stops along its way to its target, where you place the mouse when you scroll, etc. Using these metrics you could probably start to draw some characteristics of how your mouse acts b…

I was thinking more of a machine-learning approach, e.g. using a GAN network.

Many ways to skin a cat. Not an impossible thing to solve in my book. But i dont deny that it would probably be difficult.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#32

Post by jhowell »

kaybe wrote: post #26
angott wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between using this kind of technology to run usability studies or to provide more targeted advertising.

Not really. If you record and save that data, the reason is secondary.

Tracking an individuals mouse movement across devices for perpetuity, packaging said data as a product offering to potential advertisers, seems to be a more extensive undertaking than simply UI/UX improvements.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#34

Post by Klathmon »

amelius wrote: post #21
TekMol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How difficult would it be for a bot to simulate a human's mouse movements? Very very hard. Because the bot author does not have the giant database that FB has to analyze how humans move the mouse around. Also the bot author does not know which aspects FB looks at to determine if it's a human. And even if the bot author had all that information, it would still be super hard to write an AI that accomplishes a given tas…

> Very very hard. Because the bot author does not have the giant database that FB has to analyze how humans move the mouse around. Don't forget that Facebook's false positive rate should be very low. There are lots of humans on their platform, and they should all pass the test. This makes it easier to construct a bot that will pass the test.

It won't hurt if humans fail the test every so often, as long as it's under a threshold that humans regularly can overcome.

I can imagine it would be easy to trick the system a few times (either as a bot pretending to be human, or a human acting like a bot), but tricking it consistently over months or years is going to be damn near impossible.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#35

Post by andrewmackrodt »

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 in several companies.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#36

Post by sti »

mattbessey wrote: post #13

as does every person here using Mouseflow, LogRocket, or a dozen other off the shelf solutions. is this really that surprising?

Seriously my thought.. Pretty much every company does that. Not especially for detecting if its a Human or AI, but for understanding if the User has problems with the Usability of the Product..

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#37

Post by amelius »

Klathmon wrote: post #34
amelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very very hard. Because the bot author does not have the giant database that FB has to analyze how humans move the mouse around. Don't forget that Facebook's false positive rate should be very low. There are lots of humans on their platform, and they should all pass the test. This makes it easier to construct a bot that will pass the test.

It won't hurt if humans fail the test every so often, as long as it's under a threshold that humans regularly can overcome. I can imagine it would be easy to trick the system a few times (either as a bot pretending to be human, or a human acting like a bot), but tricking it consistently over months or years is going to be damn near impossible.

Also don't forget that Facebook probably has to do all detection in Javascript on the client, i.e. with limited resources. I suspect they don't send every mouse-movement to the server. This also means they probably don't have fine-grained historical data.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#38

Post by grandmczeb »

zavandor wrote: post #28
TekMol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How difficult would it be for a bot to simulate a human's mouse movements? Very very hard. Because the bot author does not have the giant database that FB has to analyze how humans move the mouse around. Also the bot author does not know which aspects FB looks at to determine if it's a human. And even if the bot author had all that information, it would still be super hard to write an AI that accomplishes a given tas…

I don't think it should be that difficult. Project for a weekend hackathon or so. Collect same mouse movement data with a js on your own website if you own anything mildly popular or partner with someone and buy it off, stick it into some off the shelf GAN, job's done. Turing test is broken by modern deep learning At least the mouse movements themselves shouldn't be difficult to do given a source of data. Simulating…

> stick it into some off the shelf GAN, job's done. Turing test is broken by modern deep learning

This is a cartoon version of deep learning.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#40

Post by pdpi »

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?

Under the hypothesis that people move their mouse to where they're intending to interact with your page, you can build a heat map of mouse locations and show your UX people where on the page users are focusing their attention. I'd probably rate it as one of the more benign forms of telemetry.
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