....I have lots of questions about this "homegrown web tracking tool" (assuming this isn't still part of a joke?). What??? Was this opt-in? Did they track across everyone? What was collected? This is troubling, to say the least.
Browsers fire a copy event when you copy, just like a click event fires when you press on a button. We just added analytics to it like we would any other feature on the site.
We didn't track the content of your copy (browsers don't let you see the text content) but we did track the following:
Meta data about the post and it's parent post like the id, owner, score, tags, if it was a question/answer, if it was accepted
If your copy was from a code block or from text content
The Referer header
Standard analytics properties like the date/time, approximated location, account metadata
Here's our privacy policy on analytics: "Analytics information Stack Overflow uses data analytics to ensure site functionality and to optimize our Product and Service offerings to you. We use web browser and mobile analytics to allow us to understand Network and Apps functionality. In doing so, we record information including, for example how often you visit the Network, how often you contribute content, Network and Apps performance data, errors and debugging information, and the type of activity you engage in while on the Network or in your use of our Products and Services. We may on occasion share this information with third parties for research or product and services optimization."
This is a bit misleading.
More accurate would be: Stack Overflow is able to configure our web pages to track certain of your activities on the page, including Copy and Click. We do that.
[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...
[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...
My point is: "We can make this thing happen, and we do so and record the results" is more accurate than "this interesting thing just happens, and we observe" which is the tone of the original.
Most sites do not configure their pages to track copy events. SO does the unusual thing. They should be honest about that.
I don't see the big deal, at all. This is absolutely nothing compared to what big advertising & social media do. Taking a count of people who hit ctr+c? Who cares, I can't see any possible scenario of how that data could be used in a bad way unless you think SO is going to email employers with a time spent & ctrl+c count or something?
1) The post says "unfortunately" they cannot tie logged-out users to their logged-in account. In no moral way is this a reasonable perspective to me. It is extremely fortunate that SO does not build the tech to track you as a logged-in user when you are logged out. That's a bad precedent to set. Sure, some sites do that, but I think they shouldn't.
Other examples of the tone in the article abound. It's troubling for sure.
2) It is up to the web devs themselves to decide what goes in your clipboard. Many users don't know this. Sites that exploit the gap between user expectation of privacy while copy+paste as well as tracking do not match with reality. Stack Overflow is merely one of many players here, but they way they exploit this gap is mildly upsetting.
Something needs to be done, either technically or communication to users, about copy+paste reality.