Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#71

Post by titzer » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:42 AM UTC

I'm not surprised. Honestly, I stopped trusting them years ago, so pretty much all the words out of their mouths I consider to be BS. I'm not even sure why people apologize for creepy-ass multi-billion dollar companies that treat their users like products and study them like labrats.

I'm looking forward to technical solutions to verifiably disable and prevent this kind of tracking.

To those talking about "tracking UI usage": do a UX study. Sit some people down and watch how they use the site. Ask them questions about what works and what doesn't. Stop spying. You got all this damn money and you can't be bothered to actually lift a finger to do some difficult work that involves interacting with all those "dirty" people out there. FFS most people would probably be happy to fill out a survey if it actually would impact the product in a positive way. Creepiness is creepy.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#72

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:44 AM UTC

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, for... reasons."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17301769

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#73

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:47 AM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #44

akerro wrote: post #39

According to lcamtuf[1] how people move mouse and use keyboard are unique per person, it's your personal digital-fingerprint that can be transferred to track you elsewhere. [1] From Book "Silence on the Wire"

Unfortunately, it's not just JS, but several other indicators. In practice, if you don't use the Tor Browser, it's as if you decided to leave tracks everywhere, almost identifying yourself. Yet, this is not common knowledge among web users. These are the things that children need to be taught in schools. The society as a whole needs to be aware and learn how to protect itself.

True, but I'd wager that if Facebook is using mouse movements to track users, it means those other methods aren't foolproof.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#74

Post by paidleaf » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 11:50 AM UTC

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?

Pretty much every major website does this. Not only that, if you are using windows 10, it does this too. Not only does windows 10 track your mouse movements, it tracks your keystrokes and it scans your filesystem and sends the meta data info back to microsoft.

It's a very anti-privacy environment we live in right now. But it's for our own good or so we are told.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#75

Post by erjjones » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:03 PM UTC

titel wrote: post #55

akerro wrote: post #39

According to lcamtuf[1] how people move mouse and use keyboard are unique per person, it's your personal digital-fingerprint that can be transferred to track you elsewhere. [1] From Book "Silence on the Wire"

You should check out https://www.typingdna.com/ a startup making this technology available for everyone.

I could see using this for fraud detection and then kick off a 2FA flow if it couldn't verify.

However, most biometrics aren't the best single line of verification. You still have to add a backup verification of some kind.

Examples, I was working on my car all weekend and my hands have new calluses on them and my finger print is off. I got a new keyboard and my typing pattern is different, etc.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#76

Post by dest » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:11 PM UTC

malmsteen wrote: post #65

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..."

yeah it's not like your mouse movements is a serious privacy issue

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.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#77

Post by r721 » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:12 PM UTC

orwin wrote: post #66

andrewmackrodt wrote: post #35

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.

Relevant:

"Following the recent report that Mixpanel, a popular analytics provider, had been inadvertently collecting passwords that users typed into websites, we took a deeper look. While Mixpanel characterized it as a “bug, plain and simple” — one that it had fixed — we found that:

- Mixpanel continues to grab passwords on some sites, even with the patched version of its code.

- The problem is not limited to Mixpanel; also affected are session replay scripts, which we revealed earlier to be scooping up various other types of sensitive information.

- There is no foolproof way for these third party scripts to prevent password collection, given their intended functionality. In some cases, password collection happens due to extremely subtle interactions between code from different entities."

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/26/no-boundaries-for-c...

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#78

Post by Yetanfou » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:13 PM UTC

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?

> Is this a social network or spy agency?

Yes

Centralised social networks are by nature spy networks in that they collect a huge amount of data on a large group of people, both data concerning those people as well as data relating those people to any of the others. As to whether a centralised social network uses these data for nefarious purposes or only to provide a service to the users is up to those currently in control of the network. Ownership can change, a once-benign social network can turn into a nightmare overnight as the data will be there for the new management to exploit.

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#79

Post by zimmund » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:16 PM UTC

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/ )

Re: Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

#80

Post by kreetx » Wed, Jun 13, 2018, 12:18 PM UTC

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…

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.