Lets all go to the Sky website and move our mices to make the shape of a large penis. :p
ISPs scramble to explain mouse-sniffing tool
Sky Broadband has been caught using JavaScript to track every click and shuffle on its support pages, but it's not alone: other ISPs have also admitted recording every frustrated wobble of the mouse on their support pages. Readers at ISP Review spotted Sky using a JavaScript tool called SessionCam to record rodent tracks on …
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:16 GMT Ged T
..how much we are prepared to share before...
Of course, there is the dependency we all have on the browsing platform you're using and its ability to provide you with the necessary controls to exercise the level of information sharing you're prepared to tolerate, even when, as in this case, that data is quite oblique...
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:22 GMT Chairo
Lies, damned lies and metrics
I love, if companies optimise their strategies on random data gathered secretly.
That way Microsoft found out that no one really wants the start button and everyone just loves to memorise and type in the program name, instead.
How about asking your users about their opinion instead? What you can't trust these lying bastards? Well then...
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 15:16 GMT Neil Charles
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...
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
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"?
Do some people follow the text with their cursors as they read, as children do with their fingers? Or is someone somewhere making a few quid conning the admen? Hope it's the latter! All seems terribly trivial either way... unlike this:
>Companies such as Path Intelligence track every mobile phone in a shopping centre (anonymously, as they have no access to, or – so they say – interest in customers' details) to see how long a window display grabs one's attention or the order in which shops are visited.
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.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:32 GMT Pete Spicer
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.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Baffling
The little "Path Intelligence" aside isn't about websites.
Thanks for the info & link Bill... What a refreshingly scrupulous data mining outfit. I'd imagine secretly harvesting persistent/identity data would deliver them an absolute goldmine of commercial opportunity. Glad they're *only* secretly harvesting our temporary numbers. :-|
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:20 GMT Bill Ray
Re: Baffling
Path Intelligence is a very interesting company. They track phones by their TMSI, a random number temporarily allocated by the network operator to avoid using the (identifiable) IMEI.
The operator can match TMSI to IMEI, and IMEI to MSISDN, and MSISDN to customer, but Path Intelligence has none of that information:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/20/tracking_phones/
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:45 GMT Thomas Whipp
Re: Baffling
within the UK "anonymous" usually means that the organisation can't identify you as a specific individual from the information it collected plus other information it may hold (or may reasonably expect to acquire) - this is the DPA definition of personal data. I think this may also have now been broadened to allow the concept of reasonable effort (i.e. if you could identify someone but it would require 10,000 hours to go though boxed files then they are still considered anonymous)
This doenst mean that the information will continue to be anonymous if accessed by someone else with better access to more information.
An example would be an IP address - to most organisations this would probably be considered anonymous data, but clearly can be narrowed down quite a lot by law enforcement (I wont go quite as far as to say it identifies an individual due to NAT, etc...)
It gets more interesting with large scale "anonymous" tracking, as the start and end points of an individuals subjects movements can become a signature in their own right. So for example in a shopping center, if someone wanted to stalk a member of staff they could potentially isolate the "anonymous" trace that always entered from a particular car park, at a particular time of day and ended up in a particular shop.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 15:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Baffling
>It gets more interesting with large scale "anonymous" tracking, as the start and end points of an individuals subjects movements can become a signature in their own right. So for example in a shopping center, if someone wanted to stalk a member of staff they could potentially isolate the "anonymous" trace that always entered from a particular car park, at a particular time of day and ended up in a particular shop.
Quite. As we're talking about shopping centres, I wouldn't imagine it'd take a great deal of effort or sophistication for a computer system to cross reference the points at which our traces pass through checkouts against till transactions. A few separate purchases in different shops and your "path", CC number and hence identity should all be neatly sewn together.
Time to go and read that 2008 article methinks.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 17:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 17:45 GMT MrXavia
Re: Baffling
Have you never used the internet?
I actually move the cursor AWAY from what I am reading, because it blocks what I am reading!
The only time my cursor is where I am looking is if I am selecting something otherwise I move it away....
I get that this data might be useful, and why you want to track users flow etc... I dabble in a bit of website design myself.. But in reality, the decision is never made by a techie, or the designer, its always the client with no clue as to what works and what doesn't.....
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 18:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Baffling
I actually move the cursor AWAY from what I am reading, because it blocks what I am reading!
The only time my cursor is where I am looking is if I am selecting something otherwise I move it away
Who said anything about reading? People look at the cursor, it moves according to their movement and the eye is drawn to it, and therefore it is an accurate representation of how most users browse a site and what they are looking at as they do so.
But in reality, the decision is never made by a techie, or the designer, its always the client with no clue as to what works and what doesn't
Maybe where you work.
Using this sort of tracking whilst redesigning our websites has empirically made our data more accessible to our clients, users spend more time looking at more data on our sites and renewal rates increase. WFM
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Friday 30th August 2013 21:28 GMT DropBear
Re: Baffling
I find it amusing someone would think that just because I'm aware a certain area of a page is an ad (and _possibly_ I may or may not have _looked_ at it for a fraction of a second) I must have actually _seen_ it. Not even close, sorry. As I'd assume most people who browsed the net for more than a week, by now I've developed quite astonishingly effective mental filters against anything I perceive as an ad. I just have no idea what's there, my mind is actively avoiding looking at any of that stuff. If you find that hard to believe, do please tell me you actually _see_ everything going on before your eyes every day, 24/7 (please don't even try going the subliminal route...)
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 18:26 GMT John Bailey
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.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 04:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Baffling
"...And it is for your benefit too."
Perhaps it is, perhaps not. But whether something that affects or involves us is a "benefit" is usually a decision we take ourselves. As with much of the tracking that goes on now, we are often being deliberately kept in the dark and given no choice as to participation. With loyalty cards for example there is a more clear cut transaction that we have to actively choose that may have some benefits that are worthwhile for us. Being tracked round a shop gives no direct palpable benefit and not active choice, and with a shopping centre as a whole the benefit to the individual is completely obscure. It's easy to "it's private property and blah blah blah...", but that is just a convenient, soft cop out.
If businesses keep on staying on the creepy side of the line and pulling the wool over the publics eyes, while avoiding public debate, there will certainly be a backlash in which arguments about hand cream availability will carry little weight.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
They would say that
"...it doesn't think it's doing anything wrong"
Given the Murdoch estate's usual line in atrocities, I suppose casually invading customers privacy seems like small beer scarcely worthy of note if there's a shekel or two to be made.
What worries me is the danger is that we all become so inured to this endless pisstaking that the problem just ceases to be seen as a problem, or far worse, is seen as a reasonable exchange. More anger, less resignation would be good.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:51 GMT Cliff
Usefulness of the results?
I have a hunch that the resultant data is pretty useless all in all. However some marketing agency has convinced their client that this is extremely useful information and will now generate a bunch of bullshit reports to justify exactly that.
Then they will make reccommndations based on those reports based on that meaningless data.
Then they will charge for those changes based on those reccommndations based on those reports based on that meaningless data.
It's possible to have data at too low a level to be useful. A city map of London with actual tube routes, sewerage tunnels, gas mains, etc doesn't add much for the pilot wanting to land at Heathrow. I think in this case it is CEO's being told they need 'big data' crystal balls. And being sold a load of balls.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:22 GMT AndyS
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.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 09:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Vote system
I appreciate your preference for being able to use the site without enabling script.
How about there is a script on top of the current system, so that it continues to work as at present for the more cautious, but can be more convenient for those comfortable with / not bothered by script?
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 12:58 GMT DrXym
Could be beneficial or harmful
I expect most sites would use this information to optimize their site so people find the information they want, or the service they want to subscribe to instead of bothering them with telephone support calls.
Though on the flip side, I suppose they could use it for evil purposes too. Quite a few websites bury telephone numbers and privacy options they DON'T want people to touch in places that they wouldn't expect to find them. So they use mouse travel and clicks to put these things in the most inconvenient places and measure the time for people to find them.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:13 GMT PhilDin
Seriously, what's the problem
Ok, you can dispute how useful this information is but why would it possibly be news? Website owners like to know how their sites are being used. Of course they'd also like to know what you ate for breakfast as well but they don't have access to that, all they know is how their own sites are being used. This is (should be) standard practice in GUI development, web or otherwise.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:58 GMT P. Lee
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.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:28 GMT silent_count
There's a reason
why NoScript is so popular. It turns out that there's too many sites which just can't be trusted.
Just personally, I don't give a rats if they want to track my every mouse wiggle. I do however resent these tosspots using my bandwidth to do it. If they want to pay my ISP's bill, they're welcome to it. Id even go so far as to write some JS to send them realistic looking mouse movements 24/7 in as many Firefox tabs as my machine's memory will support.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
"the ability to track one's eyes (to see which advert is being viewed) is already available and slipping into mainstream products"
Would someone in the know explain how this works, seeing as I only ever enable my webcam when using Skype to call family? What mainstream products? How do they track my eye movements without access to my webcam? This sounds very much like a non-researched sweeping statement...
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:26 GMT AndyS
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/
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 13:47 GMT Pascal Monett
"Perhaps we should be working out how much we're prepared to share before we start sharing it"
That boat has sailed, my good sir, and the answer is that, for the general, non-technical population, we don't give a rat's ass about it.
That's why the general unwashed post their private life (or their excuse for it) on their "walls" and can think of nothing more important on holidays than the next time they can connect to post some more drivel on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the more intelligent, privacy-conscious people will be banning ad servers, locking down scripts where they see no interest, and generally throwing all sorts of spanners in the intricate surveillance clockwork of the admen.
Because let us not forget one thing : the NSA would be a pipe dream today if Google and Co hadn't done the groundwork for it.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 17:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
There are plenty of others that do it...
there are plenty of tracking/analytic companies offering their solutions to retailers - the marketing depts love that stuff.
I implemented one such system by Qubit for a well known retailer - once their scripts are in place they can do all sorts of stuff outside the control of the actual web devs. Mouse tracking is one such module that can be enabled if the client has paid for it. Others include A/B testing, redirects, content/iframe injection, basket abandonment checking etc
Marketers love it, web devs hate them ruining and potentially breaking their carefully crafted site!
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 14:32 GMT SeymourHolz
Mouse movements are somewhat like handwriting; everyone expresses uniquely, and algorithms can be 'trained' to recognize noisy samples. When the husband logs into a service using the wife's credentials, the mouse 'telemetry' data can be used to detect the difference via statistical inference.
This sort of thing is handy for all sorts of situations.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 09:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "onmouseover"
Referring back to the article, it seems that the methods employed here are a little more involved than that. It refers to fetching the page twice so that it can be rendered in a virtual way that can then be used to interpret a combination of x/y movements.
I suppose that a basic level of element interaction tracking is possible using mouseover/mouseout events but actually recording pointer movements in pixels can lead to greater useful insight.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 16:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
I can see the point of this. For example we designed a website that had a lot of middle eastern users, and discovered that they prefer their menus on the right of the page. Likewise, we often provide two or three different ways to move around some sites because some people prefer links, others prefer menus and others like breadcrumbs. If it turns out that only 1% use a certain feature we eliminate that and free up some screen space.
Most stuff we do already with click tracking. (And no, we don't give a darn who you are, it's about how the site is used.) However, if mouse movements show that someone is unsure about what to click, or can't work out what to do next, that's valuable feedback. I'm sure that Reg users click from point to point in a dazzling series of mouse movements. But that's not typical. On the other extreme I've seen 'mouse golf' - yes it's common enough to have a name - where elderly users gently whack their mouse across the pad until a shot lands it over the icon they want. Once you know that is happening you can allow for it. (Bigger icons, and maybe .mp3 applause for an icon-in one?)
But indeed. You got to ask before trackingt - or at least tell peeps it is happening.
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Tuesday 27th August 2013 20:49 GMT bazza
Bad Design
Use of this sort of tool is no substitute for designing the website right in the first place.
Scenario: website goes up, people start using it, author uses this trick to see how people use it. Author then decides to change the design in response to the gathered data. Users now have no idea how to use the website. Repeat that cycle a few times and you end up with no users.
Get design right first time; iterative design on a live site works only if you do it veeery slowly.
Website authors are getting very lazy. A search feature does not mean that you don't need to design the website and lay it out sensibly.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 02:37 GMT Henry Wertz 1
This does provide potentially useful information
This does provide potentially useful information; if they realize people are taking a long time to find some side menu or dropdown or whatever on the site sometimes the person moves the mouse around to the areas they think it would be as they look, suggesting areas to move the non-obvious bit of web page so people find it easier. It surely could come as a surprise if you didn't know sites could track the cursor though.
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Wednesday 28th August 2013 12:37 GMT no_RS
Well how do you stop it and still use the web???
Well as the reg has raised the issue I think they should write an article about how to block all this is sort of shenanigans.
What annoys me about all this is me the user doesn't have any say in the matter and these people think they are entitled to do this. They aren't entitled and I don't like it either.
I predict the future will be a black box suppository for the ultimate in personal tracking.
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Monday 2nd September 2013 08:59 GMT alan buxey
mouse?
rarely use the mouse when visiting web sites. usually the cursor gets parked out of the way somewhere and then I use the trackpad to scroll up/down/left/right . luckily NoScript is quite useful to stop this kind of spyware too. Some sites I dont read 'natively' either - I use their aggregator feeds or mobile App to just read the articles...much much faster/better experience than their ghastly designs that they change every few months.
oh, didn't I spot spot some O2 Ads on The Register this weekend that drew a circle where your mouse was.... (noted when parking my mouse over an Ad) ;-)