ISPs scramble to explain mouse-sniffing tool

Re: eye-tracking?

Get rid of your eye-phone then and get something usable.

Re: Lies, damned lies and metrics

You can't explain Microsoft away that easily.

Only MS could take research showing that people don't use the command bar in explorer and conclude that means they should put more stuff on it and make it bigger.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/29/improvements-in-windows-explorer.aspx

Nothing wrong with the data. The management interpretation on the other hand...

Re: Baffling

Fairly sure that SIMs, MACs and IMEIs are not exposed to JavaScript on any device... but IP address is. And if you happen to be using 3G, the relevant ISP will be able to tie it to a device and thus an owner. But if you're using Wifi, the only thing that should be exposed to the ISP in the browser should be your IP address.

Re: Baffling

The only reason the "anonymous" bit gets to stick is that our spineless/clueless regulators and representatives either say nothing or don't get it. Everyone else knows its crap.

Re: Baffling

How is knowing where we park our cursors while we read a page of any interest to anyone? How are they supposed to be differentiating between "ohh this is SOOOoooooo.... tempting... shall I click... shall I click..." from "I'll just dump the cursor over the random useless crap/ad while I read the interesting stuff"?

We use ClickTale extensively at $JOB.

First things first, the company I work for sells information services B2B, meaning all our users are commercial users who are paying us to use the site and agree to us doing things like this.

We really don't care about specific people. What we are interested in is how our users interact with our designs. We use ClickTale to assess how effective our website designs are at engaging users, by doing 80/20 A/B testing with different designs - meaning 80% get design A, 20% get design B. We can then compare heatmaps of where the users positioned their mice, the theory being that people move their mouse over bits of the page they are interested in, and conversely, which bits of the page are wasted space or unused features.

Your example of dumping the cursor over the ad is interesting - we do look for that, and it is not useless data, as if you put the cursor over the ad, you are definitely looking at it! Score 1 hit.

We use click maps to see where people are leaving pages from. Are most people interested in the insight, or the statistics.

All of this is designed for us to be able to better anticipate the needs of our users. If we can do that, we can enhance their ability to get at our data. If they are using more of our data, then as a data service we become more essential, and it gets harder to cancel our contracts, which makes renewals easier. Easier renewals equates to a more stable and successful business.

I'd imagine Sky are doing the same, they want to improve the usability and success rate of their online help, so that more users require no human intervention (and hence $$$).

ClickTale is a pain to implement btw, it duplicates requests that clients make to your servers so they can draw the page on their end (in order to determine what a particular x,y location reported from a client actually corresponds to), so effectively you double your requests and confuse your existing logging.

Re: Baffling

"So how, exactly, do they do this ANONYMOUSLY. I bet the fuckers are tracking either our SIMs, MACs or IMEIs - if not all three - any of which would be as "anonymous" as our bank account numbers."

One or more of the above I'd imagine. And yes. They are as anonymous as our bank account numbers..... if not actually looked up.

Because they are just non descriptive randomly assigned numbers. Totally anonymous until looked up. If they don't look them up, you are just this number that came into the shop at this time, and took this route around the aisles. You are a time stamped squiggle on a screen. Not a person. And for their purpose, that is plenty of information.

If instead, they approached you , and asked you to carry a radio beacon around while you shop, and hand it to a member of staff before going through the checkout, would that make you happy?

How about if they offered you a quid off your shop voucher. Given to you when you hand in the transmitter?

Being able to identify someone with a specific number the next time they come in is not breaking anonymity either. Because they do not have your name and address tied to it. Or even what you bought. Only a nondescript number. . And as the shop has more than one customer, watching a specific one is not much use to them. They actually want anonymous yet individually tracked while in store mass data.

Your data is useless to them.

Everybody's data in aggregate, while in store is incredibly useful.

This is good data capture. And it is for your benefit too.

AC 12:29 hung out a questionably long time alone by the feminine hygiene department, is not the same as (your name) hung out a long time by the feminine hygiene department, and as you are a single man, perhaps someone might be well advised to call security.

You were talking on your phone.. Right? Perfectly innocent.That is not what they are after.

For sales analysis, your data alone is not much use. Nobody cares what you buy, what order you buy things, or how many times you lap the store.

47% of customers on a Tuesday spent 10 seconds longer at the fruit and veg section in front of that day's promotion means that this kind of promotion might be better targeted at Tuesday customers than Saturday customers.

32% of all customers spent 20 seconds more time at the meat pie promotion than at the low fat yoghurt promotion..

This is useful data.

This helps to indicate what promotions move most product. They care about that.

They do not care about tracking you personally, and handing your information over to the police or NSA to profile you. That is what loyalty cards are for.

This shows which products need to be ordered in larger amounts on certain days, and which ones can be cut down.

This shows which products need more prominent display space, and which ones can be carried, but can be on the bottom shelf at the corner

This means you are less likely to go to Tesco on Friday evening and find them out of that hand lotion you like. They really don't care that a single guy buys so much of it.

Re: If only they asked first

keyboard input to a form / text entered though? what if you're entering personal information? even though as a customer they would store those details already, surely?

Re: Usefulness of the results?

There are times it might work.

For example, there's a site I visit from time to time, called theregister, where I have to click multiple times in identical locations in order to up-vote or down-vote a comment.

I'm sure a very brief analysis of site usage patterns would reveal the flaw in that design, and help them to get it sorted into a more user-friendly design.

Re: Seriously, what's the problem

What's wrong is that vendors and website operators think its ok to do unexpected things: it appears they are just offering a shop-window but it turns out they are using (or rather being used by) 3rd parties who snarffle far more information about you than you thought you were giving.

Its a bit like free phone ereader apps which pick up all your address book contacts and ask for global internet access and access to your phone state. One too-fast click-through and its all over.

Go-go noscript!

I think if I were Nokia/MS, I'd forgo all those free apps and google apps in my store and offer a resource restricter were resources (including URLs and files) are blocked by default and user-allowed.

Tracking gui usage is fine for gui development - but it should stick to being used in development, not in prod.

Re: There's a reason

I do however resent these tosspots using my bandwidth to do it

How does that work then? You're minding your own business, consuming someone else's website, and then those fuckers try and track you. I'd demand your money back pal.

Smartphones

Smartphones - they are actually already pretty mainstream, you probably know several people with one of them. I've got one on my desk.

Anyway, the newest ones already have this technology, as discussed, for example on theregister:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/15/lg_eye_tracking/

Re: "Perhaps we should be working out how much we're prepared to share before we start sharing it"

"That boat has sailed..."

Perhaps not. When politicians see a problem of this sort (turning the masses against tracking), they do what comes naturally and fire up the spin machine to turn lies and heresay into cast iron facts to repeat on Newsnight ad nauseum. I still wake up in a cold sweat from time to time seeing Hazel Blears rodent like visage saying either "hard working families" or "five a day" so it must have some (horrific really) effect. I digress; those opposed to tracking merely need to do the same, and use the existing tools of mass hysteria to their advantage; if you can persuade the Daily Mail, Daily Star, Telegraph etc that mouse tracking or exposure to behavioural targeted ads turns female tennis coaches into predatory paedophile lesbians or people with facial hair into card carrying funders of the Surbiton chapter of Boko Haram, your jobs almost done and you can sit back an watch the backlash. Plenty of University research departments seem to pimp themselves out doing dodgy drug evaluations if the fundings right, so a few scathing reports from sociology departments should be a cut price pushover for the price of a few beers and a brick lane curry. And if you can get Chris Morris on board, even a wide range of celebrity endorsements isn't out of the question.

The image of Rupert Murdoch and a group of terrified admen being pursued by an armed, baying mob screaming "death to pedoterrortrackers" would be far more pleasant to wake up to than Hazel the Horror.