Slashdot Mirror
Browser Spyware: Watching Where You Linger
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Just when you you'd installed Junkbuster and thought it was safe to go back onto the web, the BBC runs this story which tells you that webshites will soon(?) be able to tell whether you are reading the page, what parts of it are of interest to you, etc. Guess we can expect porn sites to be the first to take advantage of this." Or perhaps someone else is already doing this, and hasn't told you.
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right ..."
I guess I shall just have to become left handed then.
Must hit post before I think about repercusions.
--- Matthew Hill
"To quote the self is an act of the self riteous and uninitiated sub-moronic" - Matthew Hill
Or perhaps someone else is already doing this, and hasn't told you.
Somebody was up late playing Deus Ex last night, right timothy??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
....be able to tell whether you are reading the page, what parts of it are of interest to you, etc. Guess we can expect porn sites to be the first to take advantage of this." Or perhaps someone else is already doing this, and hasn't told you.
Does anyone actually *READ* porn sites? Maybe the keyboard needs a 'moisture detector' to see when and if the user is drooling, then send the result back to the spy server.
The system developed by the team at MIT is called Cheese, since they are following the mouse, like a mouse follows cheese.
Wouldn't a better title have been "Cat"? Or perhaps "Rodent Stalker"?
I find if I close my eyes while I browse, all the big bad men who spend all their lives tracking me go away.
That or type left handed - that always throws them off. Gotta run before they figure out my whereabouts from this post.
Chet
But you never know, some marketroid can probably read meaning into how fast you can type GET / HTTP/1.0
Why do people need all this fancy mouse tracking.
(grumpy old man)
In MY day, we looked at the logs to see what people are looking at
(/grumpy old man)
Don't Tread on Me
first of all we are assuming that the 'marketing genius'' can figure how to take advantage of this technology
When they have acumulated all the data on the user navigation habits they will analyse it in detail and design a highly sophisticated website. This website will encorperate the latest in DOM javascript navigation, with mouseovers on all the menu items, which lead to multiple screens, each screen will have blurry 3D style bitmaps and the background will be a smiling yuppy in a suit.
...All this despite the fact that the entire sum of information could easily be contained in one simple HTML table.
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right so that it is out of the way, or you will walk down the page with your mouse,"
What would a circular motion of the mouse mean? Is my mouse dirty? Maybe they could automaticaly send some mouse cleaning consultant over.