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I was at a University that paid for some tracking software we self-hosted. It showed a highlighted webpage showing gradients over the most common places they scrolled too.

Adblock lists are community maintained, so whether this stuff is blocked depends a lot on people who actually enjoy having their network debug panel open.

Facebook's tracking pixel their e-commerce affiliates use is insane. It sends most mouse movements and they use it to determine what words users hover their mouse over! Their AI/marketing engine is pretty advanced, to the point where their predictive analysis is accurate enough people swear Facebook/Instragram are sending microphone data.

Sure they cannot track you across tabs and browsers ... directly. But they do. If 30% of the pages you visit have some kind of Adobe Omniture or Facebook pixel, they do in fact gleam a ton of data about you. This AI is so powerful it can predict products you want, potentially before you even verbally announce them. That's incredibly powerful predictive analysis ... used to cure cance---oh no wait. It's not. It's just used to sell you shit. What a waste of tech honestly.

I know a lot of people here use uBlock Origin since there are concerns with Ghostery/AdBlock/etc either allowing in certain ads for a price or selling some of your data to be viable. The only real solution for tech people is to run a Javascript blocker like NoScript, and explicitly white listing what you want to run .. which is honestly a ton-o-work.

I agree with 100% of what you said, the level of tech being used for behavior predictions is scary and the level of tech being used for sales seems like we could be putting all this engineering to better use. OTOH, this seems like natural economics to me given our system, for better or worse. Money is the driver of all things, sadly.

Yep, heat maps for mouse movements are a very common technique. You get click location data out of Google Analytics and everyone uses Google Analytics.

But we should be clear and careful -- since I'm using the web site, my click data is not something I can ever keep private from the web site. We can (and probably should) keep it from third parties, but first party mouse and keyboard data isn't a privacy concern.

Good point about cross-tab tracking, this is fairly common too, and an ad blocker does usually block this. But, the article was primarily about key logging, and the iframed ads can't do any key logging.

Don't get me wrong; I use an ad blocker myself, and I think it's a good idea. I just wanted to make the point that blocking only 3rd party content does not solve the problem this article pointed at, and it especially doesn't solve direct key logging or mouse tracking by the website you're using.

"first party mouse and keyboard data isn't a privacy concern"

If that data can be used to infer anything about me, it certainly is a privacy concern for me.

I think of it like going to a library and instead of freely browsing through the books without being watched, instead being spied on and every book I look at and even where my gaze travels through each book's pages being monitored.

This is a paranoid's nightmare level of surveillance, and that's what we're gradually being weaned in to accepting. It certainly is a major privacy concern for me.

Ideally, the internet would have been built in such a way as to allow fully private and anonymous use, as it's really nobody's business but your own what you look at, what you're interested in, or what you read.

We've helped build the internet in to a spy's paradise, and it's really sad.

> I think of it like going to a library and instead of freely browsing through the books without being watched, instead being spied on and every book I look at and even where my gaze travels through each book's pages being monitored.

I totally agree and empathize with the increasingly privacy hostile place the internet is. But, that analogy seems a little hyperbolic to me. The library currently does track which books you check out, and maybe fine you when you’re late to return them. They do track which books are popular, in order to figure out what to stock. Some libraries track how their building is being used, and my local library does have cameras. These are all the same kinds of things web sites are doing. It may be more aggressive on a site, and more focused on selling you something, but it’s not fundamentally different. First party sites (not ads) aren’t tracking your gaze or invading your privacy, they’re responding to what you ask for, and using some of the breadcrumbs you leave to improve conversions if they can.

Talking to a person face to face has exactly the same issues. If I buy a car, for example, the sales guy will definitely watch my gaze and listen to what I say with an ear toward exploiting anything I share with him to increase his odds of selling me a car. We wouldn’t call what the sales guy does a privacy issue, and what “first party” web site tracking directly (without third party services) is doing is no more creepy and no less private than what car sales guys do.

If the direct tracking is sold or shared or handled by a third party, then absolutely, huge privacy concerns. But for the direct communication, if you don’t want someone to infer anything about you at all, your only choice is and always has been to not use the service.

"that analogy seems a little hyperbolic to me. The library currently does track which books you check out"

This is why I explicitly talked about browsing of books at the library, not checking them out.

But now that you mention it, tracking who checks out which books also has disturbing privacy implications, and I am against that. There's nothing stopping an anonymous library checkout system from being designed and implemented, if we only had the will.

Camera use in libraries is a relatively new phenomenon, and I'd have similar privacy concerns about it if, like website tracking, its explicit aim was to track who was looking at which books, but as far as I know it's not being used for that purpose. But it's not very far from being capable of doing that, especially with high resolution cameras and facial recognition systems. So that's definitely something to keep an eye on.

"Talking to a person face to face has exactly the same issues. If I buy a car, for example, the sales guy will definitely watch my gaze and listen to what I say with an ear toward exploiting anything I share with him to increase his odds of selling me a car. We wouldn’t call what the sales guy does a privacy issue"

I would in fact call that a privacy issue. We're just so used to it we don't normally notice it. There's also an enormous difference between one person noticing your interest in one thing and the systemic, omnipresent surveillance apparatus we've made the internet in to, which is tracking all your interests, and voiced opinions and ideas.

Look at the repression, imprisonment, murder of political or ideological opponents throughout history, and you'll see their surveillance, tallying, and location has always been a part of that. Today's surveillance apparatus is thousands or millions of times more effective than it's ever been in the past, and every bit of data collected about you feeds in to those profiles which could be used against you. We should oppose it, instead of meekly submitting to it, much less enabling it.

I'm totally with you on the surveillance and potential misuse of tracking information. This is a brave new world.

You're right that there is a difference between face to face conversations and digital tracking. That's why I'm weaseling out with my "first party" qualifications. As long as the tracking is between you and the site you're on, it's sort-of similar to personal conversations. Not the same, but not super different. As soon as third parties and groups of people and governments are involved, it's wildly different.

The camera issue is interesting. This will be a growing concern from now on. According to US law, there is no expectation of privacy from being photographed while you're in a public place. You are not currently entitled to privacy in a library, or while walking downtown, or while driving in a car on public roads. But that law wasn't drafted with the idea of digital mass surveillance in mind, nobody had the capability to capture and correlate all your movement when it was written.

I've been using NoScript since forever and one gets used to it.

Also, I've always wondered what the use is of tracking which words the mouse is hovering over. I mean who does that: hovering the mouse over words?

> who does that: hovering the mouse over words?

Lots of people, you’d be surprised. ;) Sometimes I catch myself unconsciously highlighting what I’m reading.

But the mouse tracking is for detecting waffling potential button clicks and form fills too.

It’s a bad proxy for attention, but it is a proxy that kinda works.

Quite often I'll move the mouse pointer out of the way of what I'm reading. So my mouse pointer will be "hovering", but not over anything I'm interested in at all.

If you midway opt for a different credit card, phone number, alias, name, or address that all gets lumped together. They get a better picture of you.

Lots of people will cut and paste passwords and sensitive information while working and swapping back and forth between applications. That would include every sort of personal information possible that can be put into a clipboard.

Yes, that's all true. Do assume that anything you type into a website is being recorded, even if you delete it before clicking anything.

Having 3rd party tracking services is a bit of a problem with some complex issues, but it's very common. Ad blockers can help, but I suspect the ability for ad blockers to increase privacy is going down. It's easy for sites to configure third party services as though they belong to the site's domain, and all ad blocking goes out the window. This is an arms race that will not end by blocking third party requests.

For first party tracking though, direct tracking by the web site, there is no hard line for what input tracking even means, using the web site at all is a form of input tracking. Logging of inputs to a site by the site should be and always has been expected. Accidentally sending sensitive data directly to a site has always been a problem, and ad blockers don't solve that problem at all.

Typing in a form field on a private forum page I wouldn’t expect that my conversations are also available to the advertisers posting banners to that page.