>Most popular website are tracking your mouse movements and clicks on their website. It's called a user heatmap and it's meant to be used to see what users are actually clicking on when they drop into your website i.e. everyone highlighted this word on you copy or stopped scrolling after this section that sort of thing.
It's even worse than this. They have full HD screen recordings of every single user session, including all values typed into any input field regardless of submission. I can pull up hundreds of thousands of unique user sessions right now and sit there watching everything they did on our sites, going back for years.
Say it with me now:
Every. Single. Interaction. With. Any. Computer. Is. Tracked.
It would be really inefficient to store this as a full HD video for thousands of users.
If you store and mouse movements, scroll events, clicks ...etc and you know what the website looked like then you can replay these to produce something that looks like a video. The bonus points is that you can run mathematically analysis on the clickstream to get things like most clicked area and suchlike.
It's actually the same data that's used in the heatmap just a different visualisation.
Most heat mapping services do not store such qualitative data because of the cost (e.g. hot jar). They opt instead to simply reproduce the "almost full story" by faking a video from the data. Services like fullstory are different.
Customers are already video recorded in a real life shop, which not only provides analytical data but also contains their personal information (face, credit card, what they purchased, etc.). Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy?
>Is anonymously tracking which buttons were clicked on a site more creepy?
It's not anonymous and it's not just buttons. Furthermore it comes down to consent. I can see the cameras in the shop. I have no idea without doing network traffic analysis what kind of surveillance is happening on a website.
Some shops do apply machine learning on recorded videos of customers to find out more info about how they navigate the store. As far as I remember, even electronic advertising panels have cameras and track how long people are looking at the ad and store the age/race of the person.
It's even worse than this. They have full HD screen recordings of every single user session, including all values typed into any input field regardless of submission. I can pull up hundreds of thousands of unique user sessions right now and sit there watching everything they did on our sites, going back for years.
Say it with me now:
Every. Single. Interaction. With. Any. Computer. Is. Tracked.