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 wish sites would realize that pissing off their viewers with popups and big honking ads, does not make the viewer more likely to visit the advertisers site or buy their product. It has quite the opposite effect. I've stopped going to some sites that I like for the simple reason that I really F*ing hate popups!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
For crying out loud, /., lighten up. Remember back in '95 when you couldn't turn on the TV or read a news magazine without some lame story about online stalking or pedophiles in chatrooms? And we all mocked them by saying "that's no different than real-life, what's all the hullabaloo"?
"Brick and mortar" stores do exactly this same thing. Many have cameras, the rest use "secret shoppers" (people who look like they are shopping but are really watching YOU) to discourage shoplifting, check competitor prices AND research in-store "migratory patterns". For instance, haven't you ever noticed that ALL grocery stores have the fresh fruits and vegetables right by the door?
This isn't "Your Rights Online". This is "Translating Nothing Cares About In RealLife Into A Scare Story About 'The Net' In Order To Attract Eyeballs To Slashdot."
324006
It seems like it'd be a good idea if Konqueror added an option to ignore single-pixel tracking images... should we submit this to bugs.kde.org?
Stop right there, because that's your answer. It will never be moderate. As soon as they can, it is in the marketers best interest to get as much advertising to you as they can in the shortest amount of time, and the more they know, the more they will.
It is sad, but in the future, we'll probably look back fondly on things like PeoplePC which gave only one advertiser the keys to the car...
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
While reading the article, I left the mouse in the main browser window and used the keyboard to scroll. So if their system was used, it would make it appear that I was not reading the article, even though I did in fact read it.
Really, if you stay on a page for more than a few seconds, you're probably reading it. And that would surely be simple enough to determine, although you'd have to figure out a bulletproof way to put up an invisible frame in order to send the information to the mother ship. It would probably be easiest done in Java, which can do that without pulling up a web page, but many people have non-working Java, so even that's not foolproof.
Unfortunately for the people who created this model, once people become aware of how it works, it will no longer function. People who would formerly hover the mouse over a link would simply refrain from doing so and therefore give the system no useful data. I also suspect individual personal styles are going to be different enough to stymie them in the end. I am not convinced that people only visit links directly if they have been to the site before, for example.
For the person who said a scroll mouse would defeat this system, I'm sure signals from the scroll wheel can be read as well.
When I am hesitating between multiple items, I will often put them in my cart, look at the total and then remove the one that makes the total too high, or that I'm unsure about. Anything I put in my cart and took out, and any abandoned shopping cart contents, would be a ripe selling weapon that can already be used without relying on this technique.
I think this one's too flaky for practical use. But as always, we'll see.
D
But scary. The thing I most fear is that people(marketing??) will setup websites that are only visible to people willing to allow their every move to be watched. For security reasons it is very wise to have javascript and active-x switched off, so I don't take kindly to being forced to either switch it on, or not visit the site. Though quite often I can view source and find the page that the javascript was going to send me to next, anyway.
This is yet a little more frightening...
I think that the idea that some AI code can tell what I'm truly interested in and what I'm going to buy is ridiculousness. While it may be true that most people do work in similar ways with the interfaces of web-published documents, what goes on in the individual mind during the process is certainly unknowable.
This technology sounds like it could cause more harm than good. I can see this sort of thing narrowing the scope yet again of what content is available online.
This will lead to the customisation of individual users' content without them even being aware that it is happening. "Can you imagine if I can actually tell that you wanted to press a link but didn't". (What?! Maybe there's a reason why I didn't!?)
It's bad enough that content it already spoon-fed to most people already - does it have to be chewed for us now first too? And when the people are only exposed to the things that the corporations will believe that we're interest in, it will lead further to the atrophy of the collective consumer consciousness.
Fortunately for me, I'm still using the 10th Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary... perhaps I'm a dying breed. *shrug*
"Sic transeunt omnia."
Look, since day one of the commercial web, sites have obsessively tracked how many hits they get, where they're coming from, how a user moves through the pages, where they spend time and how often they return. (As if Andover/OSDN isn't doing all of those things -- or is this like with web bugs where we're just supposed to care about them on other sites?) That's one of the great edges the net was going to have over other media. To the degree that people are bothered by that and to the degree that they're technically sophisticated, they turned off cookies and otherwise interfered. And what does Junkbuster have to do with anything?
What this seems to be is an incremental advance in tracking how pages are read -- there's a little added feedback about mouse movements and maybe scrolling. As always, if this takes off it will be trivial to block for those who know and care about such things. And everyone else has far more important privacy invasion being done to them.
I was thinking the same thing, how can they do this since web browsing involves stateless, connectoinless technologies.
So I thought about it, and here is a possiblity:
If a JavaScript or a Java applet can subtly catch your mouse movements, then they can be imbedded in hidden inputs on the web page. Every link on that page fires off a JavaScript which will submit the form and then redirect you to which ever page you requested. The mouse movement data can only be reported if you select another page.
In all honesty, paying attention to your actions is the same thing any brick and mortar shop owner can do why watching you walk down the aisles. When stores were smaller and people friendlier, shop owners made it their job to remember your name, your family, and your preferences (The usual, Mr Smith?). What this technology is trying to do is no different than that, it is just not always being done by not-so-friendly people.
And single pixel images are used in many sites. Again, freshmeat uses single pixel images for thin lines. (I also use them too).
Anyway, forget it. Web is no longer a medium to distribute content, but now formatting and layout.
Actually, I usually surf with javascript turned off, and the sites where this causes problems can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And for those rare sites I have the choice of
- not there going again
- just allowing those sites in my konqueror browser's javascript ACL.
Of course, if you're in the habit of surfing to porn sites, you might be somewhat more dependant on javascript...Actually, using javascript well should mean to not make an obligation out of it, but to use it solely to provide additional and optional functionality. The site should still stay useable even if the user doesn't want or isn't able to use javascript. You know, blind people who are bound to surf using lynx (because their braille lines, or text-to-speech engines only support text browsers) cannot just turn on javascript, even if they wanted!
Example: Let's say you want to draw a horizontal bar with a rounded edge, ala slashdot. You can make an image that has the rounded edge, then a seperate image that's simply a one pixel gif of the same color, that you then stretch by using height and width attributes on the img tag.
This will prevent the color differences between the two images, as they'll both be using the same graphics library to display. This however also minimizes download time, because all you really need to make a colored bar is one pixel of the exact color you want.
Be less paranoid.
"[T]he Internet is as public as Grand Central Station, or Central Park. People should have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet."
That depends on what you mean by "reasonable expectation of privacy." I am well aware that when I go to a public area such as Grand Central Station that I might been observed by people who know me or people who don't, and that I might or might not be aware of it.
However, I do not consider it likely that someone who knows nearly everything about me will track where I go in Grand Central Station, what I do there, how long I take to do it, whether I do it alone, and so forth -- and I damn sure don't consider it likely that this mysterious individual about whom I will know almost nothing will have the ability and the desire to sell what he has learned about me to a third party so that that third party may increase what _it_ knows about me. Some people think that way, but in general we mock and deride them for being paranoid. Yet on the Web, we mutely accept such a state of affairs and often mistakenly tell people that such is no different from our daily life.
The legal phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" is like "shadows and penumbras" -- it gives the lawyers and the IANALs something to quote and sound very wise but it doesn't _mean_ anything other than what the judge of the moment thinks it means. That's not a solid legal footing for anything. And with technology far outpacing our legal system, perhaps even this shifting-sand legal foundation should be revisited.
If I may address your initial point, that you are satisfied with moderate advertising in exchange for some surrender of your personal privacy, I don't think that many would disagree. However, the Web and indeed any purchase that involves either plastic or corporations or both will not permit that bargain. They _demand_ that you surrender everything about yourself (and they will fill in the gaps by "sharing information" with their "partners" to "serve you better") and they then bombard you with promotional materials that have only the most tenuous connection to your purchasing interests. And yet people continue to happily accept that, in exchange for a nickel off here or a rebate coupon there -- and these people are fouling it up for the rest of us who _don't_ share your opinion that a little marketing is worth a little privacy. When I buy groceries, I have to fight off the "Frequent shopper card?" chirping from the clerk. When I want a thirty-cent resistor at Radio Shack I have to deal with "Home address?" from the clerk. It's time to return to the day when a business transaction consisted of a person giving money for a product, no more, no less. Keep your advertising and your targeted marketing and your insiders-only discounts. Just gimme my damn resistor, sir.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
No. I am using my hardware, and my bandwidth and watching it in my home. This is more like Victoria's Secret setting up an X10 in my bathroom to do "market research" on how i view their catalog.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
This one struck me as odd, too. Don't believe I've ever seen a mouse "follow" cheese. Wasn't even aware that cheese could move. The MIT folks may be brilliant, but they ain't creative.
This would take me a week to implement in JavaScript. Set up listeners for nearly and and all mouse events. Log them using a Javascript Object. Serialize it to XML or some tighter data format. Analyze later. The tricky part is the analysis and figuring out exactly what you want to have listeners for. Still.. not that difficult at all.
Jeremy
On the topic of pop-ups, I've read through the page you cited, but I still have one more question: does Mozilla have the ability to enable pop-ups only from clicking on a link? Disabling pop-ups entirely is irritating as many genuinly useful sites use pop-ups when a link is clicked. It seems that the Mozilla solution is to add each legitimate site by hand; hardly an optimal solution.
FWIW, OmniWeb has this feature.
- j
I hate commercials on TV, but they have to pay for the content. Therefore, I stopped watching, but I don't complain about it - there's no point. Who likes popups? You could use technology to circumvent them, but this is unethical at best.
Unethical? What about the fact that I'm the one paying to download their advertisement? Since I'm the one paying for my connection to the Internet, and all of the traffic on that connection, I have the right to decide what content is appropriate on that connection. If I decide to block useless ads and popups that's entirely my right.
In general, I think that companies which try all of these very annoying advertising strategies are ultimately wasting their time and money. They should go read the Cluetrain Manifesto and get a clue.
To email me,subtract my nick from my email address, starting with the second character. (hint: adto.uiuc.edu is wrong)
is that a bit of a freudian slip?