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Facebook Testing Screen-Tracking Software For Users
cagraham writes "Facebook is currently testing software that would track user's cursor movements, as well as monitor how often a user's newsfeed was visible on their mobile phone, according to the Wall Street Journal. The additional data from such tracking would potentially let Facebook raise their ad prices, as they could deliver even more information about user's on-site behavior to advertisers, such as how long users hovered over specific ads. In order to analyze the extra data, Facebook will utilize a custom version of Hadoop."
Remember folks, you're not the customer, you're the product.
Come'on really. How reliable would this be anyway? News? Move on. Next!
I like to leave my cursor hovering over ads while I go to the bathroom or cook dinner.
Data means nothing without analysis.
Make your ad sound-equipped video and I'll block anything from that provider and probably stop going to your web site.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wonder how long it will be until FB accounts start getting banned because users use AdBlock with this techology...
3...2..
If Facebook can measure how much a user was interested in an ad, how long before it is allowed to measure how much a user was interested in commiting a crime and sending that info to the authorities?
I have no problem with them tracking the cursor movement on my mobile phone.
Why not? I don't care if Facebook knows what I type. What's the big deal here? Want some cheese with that whine? Who cares, move on!
And this is why we block adverts.
I felt bad at first blocking adverts so I didn't do it.
But then websites abused that over and over.
A few text adverts ok, that's just about acceptable.
Just when pages have multiple graphic or even video adverts that's not.
And when they start profiling and tracking you then that's simply abuse.
I now agressively block advertising and tracking on every website I can.
And it's because they didn;'t know when to stop.
a world where once you leave your local shopping store a man follows you around all day, recording where you go, what you look at, what you buy, the music you listen to, the tv shows you watch, which commercials you pay attention to, which ones you don't. There's no law against this, and if you tell him to leave you alone he ignores you. You file an opt out form and he still follows you, but now he hides in the bushes. This is what is happening, but to all of your online life. Thanks for reading.
Figuring out how to get people to click on ads....
How would you separate the people using adblock from the people that have no interest in ads and routinely avoid them?
I don't think there's been an ad on Facebook that I've desired to click on. For a company that stripe mines user data as their core business, they seem terrible at advertising (or at least advertising to me).
This could just as likely torpedo their sales by proving what everyone in the ad business knows, but nobody says out loud (to keep the suckers on the hook) -- internet ads don't work very well.
FaceBook asked the world to raise your hand if you are ok with them using all of your information and habits to get you to click on ads, and every FB account was a hand raised. Even if you only use it to "stay in touch with family and close friends", "I never click ads", "I run AdBlockPlus" ect... You are a number they use to get more money.
And that would literally be the ammunition I need to nuke my account. I've noticed the only people I kep in touch with on there that I don't see regularly in real life, I could do without anyhow.
Party?!? What kind of party is this? Where's the damn keg?
Virtus Junxit Mors Non Separabit
So ... we'll be moving from click-fraud to hover-fraud?
To bad I stopped using it, approve it's usage or advising of it's use
Hope you are dead in 2 years!
1) Add guid to each ad.
2) Store which ad guid is sent to which user at time and for how long.
3) jQuery check the ad div, get guid;
4) Confirm with server - if guid matches what it should be, no problem. If guid doesn't, client is using ad block. Banhammer (or more likely tell them to disable it).
Don't know how much they use it for individual user metrics, but they use it for click prediction (this user is 80% probable to click this button in 200ms, the page it leads to takes 100ms to render -> start preloading the page for faster responsiveness). Whatever else they do with it, that use at least is distinctly non-evil.
They could just give out free televisions with integrated webcams, and as an added bonus it would come with a screensaver of some mustached dude staring sternly at you. And paint their drones black. And start calling their datacenters "ministries". How's the war with Google going, Mark? Same as it always has?
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Don't wait. Waiting to cancel your FB account is just your addiction's way of stalling your conscious thought for time until you forget that you wanted to quit. It's like that smoker who says he'll quit... after this big project is done, or after this problem with the gf is over, or once he's gotten this one last thing cleared away.
Quit for a week. Don't wait; do it now. It's just for a week, so there's no point in waiting until FB starts its next round of raping your privacy. Block FB in your hosts file and see if you actually miss it after a week.
If the sun still rises and sets for you and life continues without FB after a week, then quit permanently.
some client-side scripting-based web site analytics already do cursor and user-interaction tracking.... as do many ordinary offline applications that install on the local pc..
and how often you load your own newsfeed on your mobile? that ain't anything special either.......
but what is new, is that facebook is going to implement things like this to gather even more data on the hundreds of millions of ignorant sheep that use their site.
Not to mention NoScript.
I figured that they already knew I liked checking out all of the hot chicks in the Match.com/online dates.
Maybe some other algorithm already knows that I'm sad and alone. :(
Isn't that sort of analytic fairly common? Generating heat maps for instance?
Getting hard to sell those ads for more money eh? Pump all the data you want, I still won't buy your crap.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Hmm...on one hand, Facebook, on the other, AdBlock.
:-)
I know which one *I* would choose
That's what RSS was supposed to be about, and before that NNTP. But Facebook works even on a PC with no NNTP client or RSS reader.
Spotify now has its own authentication in parallel with Facebook authentication. And in what geographic area or industry, other than perhaps social marketing, do absolutely all employers require that one's Facebook account not be left blank on the job application?
This is way too resource intensive to be practical. That FB crap already eats too many CPU cycles in a browser. Adding this type of "we're not spying on you, we're just making sure that we delivered ads to you and that you're going to look at them, click on them and then endorse the products or we're going to make sure you never use FB again" crap will eliminate a significant number of their users. And FB sells its user count more than anything else.
You find when kicked out that all local businesses have trusted this store with their access card security, and are the only ones permitted to issue badges in the city.
I don't follow this part of the analogy. Are you referring to web sites that 1. use only Facebook login and 2. have no close substitute? If so, I've seen very few sites that do that other than Answers.com and things like FarmVille.
... with the idea that the position of my mouse is any kind of indication as to where my eyes are looking? I move the mouse out of the way so that it doesn't obscure the text I'm trying to read. What moron of an advertiser is going to pay extra for knowing that we've moved our mouse over their ad? It has virtually no correlation with where my attention is focused.
I sense, though, that this will make FB even more of a pain in the ass to load when all this mouse location software needs to be downloaded into my browser. (Which it won't because I'll be blocking that in a heartbeat.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Until things like cpalead become more common. If you don't sign up for one of the three free trials, you're locked out of the page. Or until video ads cause you to hit the monthly cap imposed by your ISP.
there are ads on Facebook? Huh.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Facebook + distributed computing == tracking entire human race... Hmmmm.... Sounds like the first version of the Matrix to me. I wonder who the systemic anomaly will be...
I hate a number of their ads. You couldn't pay me enough to click on them. Seriously.
Now that I know they (might) have mouse-based tracking all I have to do is figure out what their (weak) logic is and then try that as an avenue to reduce the uninteresting ads. Why do I get commercials in spanish if I don't speak spanish?
Truly ground breaking! ;)
Do you mean the "Login to Facebook to Post a Comment" buttons that appear in comments section when you browse on a mobile device? I've seen those. If I view the same page on a desktop or laptop computer, or I tell Chrome for Android or Firefox for Android to use a desktop User-agent string, other login options become available under "Comment using...", including Google authentication.
Maybe the other guy just has more ethanol in the tank? For a phone 3 dashes would be full charge, for a car, a gauge is usually divided by 4 or 6 or 8, am not sure how many blocks there are on those digital ones usually.
Y'know, I'd have more faith in these 'Facebook is Omnipotent' stories if Facebook ever once actually served up something I cared about. I joined five years ago and I'm on FB several times per day. I post links, and update my status. I post a few pictures per week. I check in here and there using the mobile app. I have a couple of hundred friends and I comment on their postings. Facebook knows my location, age, gender, marital status. It knows I like James Bond and I'm an airplane geek... On and on.
Yet Facebook has never, once, posted ANYTHING that would cause me to go "Hey, that's interesting," and click. Never once. Right now it's serving me up an ad telling me to go to school to be a social worker, and another ad from my current ISP telling me to switch to them, even though I'm already using them. Yeah, great data mining FB.
Presumably implemented with some javascript that will use mouse-over events to send the data back.
Solution : a browser plugin that sends millions of these events back to them whenever you're not particularly busy. Can specify any random time ranges you feel like, false ad info and user credentials. Make their Hadoop big data a whole lot bigger.
I effectively have a "brain filter" in place where I ignore ads.
Most people do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
spend time and resources tracking your potential customers.
How long can they keep this up? The advertisers keep paying more and more for more info, but what benefits do they really get? They can target their ads better, but they have to spend more to do so. This money could just be spent on running more ads in general. And are sales really rising because of all this? They can spend more on advertising but it doesn't mean consumers will spend more on product. They only have so much disposable income and are already spending a lot. The only thing that can change is how they are spending it, and that will not happen when a company is expanding their advertising budget and making their product more expensive.
TLDR: Who needs all this info and why?
You don't know what you are missing.
This is used so much that after several years of using adblock, I can count on 1 hand the number of times I have been blocked or harangued.
"Here comes the first output. What does it say?!?!?"
"The pattern-recognition AI says, after studying millions of instances of tracking, we should use ads with 'selfies' of humanoids wearing tight clothes hiding prominent chest tumors."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How would you separate the people using adblock from the people that have no interest in ads and routinely avoid them?
Look for the logged in accounts that never have any mouse movement activity?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If Failbook want to start an ad blocking arms race which they can't possibly win, and probably waste millions trying to fight, all they need to do is make their bizarre Orwellian 'look at me or get banned' ad police mechanism sufficiently annoying and pervasive, that it breeds a new generation of blockers which can outwit the checks easily, and probably encourage more people to start using aggressive blockers where they were previously not filtering any or just a few ads.
I suspect this would be the point where Failbook's Privacy Intrusion and Stalking Department realise they don't have a chance succeeding with technical measures, and start making legal threats to anyone hosting the ad blocker downloads. It's little things like this which are the real reason for which we should be grateful for TPB and onion sites.
Are Belong To USNSA
Did you listen to me? No! You all thought I was a nut-job because I bailed out of Facebook. Who's laughing at who, now?
Sheep.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
FB is so pervasive that people will knuckle under rather than lose access to their friends, events, potential work contacts, and authentication to various services.
FB is too big and has too much momentum to go away anytime soon, especially with zero competitors.
Perhaps that is why Facebook performance sucks. The more stuff they add in the worse the software works. They might be better off just getting it to work correctly.
Facebook has been doing this for ages. It started years ago with the hovercards (hovering over a person's face brings up details and alerts Facebook each time) and grew from there. A few months ago I observed using the Firefox Web Developer tools that Facebook was monitoring when a user hovered over a Like button (not necessarily clicked), advertisements, possibly tracking what part of the page the user was on, and more. Quick analysis from a curious user didn't reveal the full details of exactly what they were tracking.
Basically Facebook would rather give the news itself rather than letting someone else spill the beans. It's a cheap PR stunt, no more.
Facebook ... has ads ? Really ? Thank you adblock !