Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements

I have always assumed that Facebook uses heat maps to track what is under your pointer. Doesn&#x27;t every serious site do that to gauge user behavior, interest and interface utilization? I guess the difference is FB is putting it in an available data set along with everything else about consumers&#x27; individual lives.<p>More interesting is &quot;a patent held by the company states that the Facebook app uses voice recognition algorithm, which uses audio recorded by the microphones, to modify the ranking scores of stories in users News Feed.&quot; and their speculation that Facebook could soon reveal details about their use of surreptitiously recorded user audio.<p>Facebook makes a curiously specific denial about audio, which is that it is not used for advertising. Considering their entire business is basically advertising, what does that leave? But all they mean is ad selection. When they were found to be recording audio during the posting of statuses, I believe they claimed it it was so they could recognize the music you were listening to, and know something about your mood. So for a long time, I have thought that they use audio to select other content, like friend suggestions, or to inform the selection of stories that appear on your newsfeed.

I&#x27;m not surprised. Honestly, I stopped trusting them years ago, so pretty much all the words out of their mouths I consider to be BS. I&#x27;m not even sure why people apologize for creepy-ass multi-billion dollar companies that treat their users like products and study them like labrats.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to technical solutions to verifiably disable and prevent this kind of tracking.<p>To those talking about &quot;tracking UI usage&quot;: do a UX study. Sit some people down and watch how they use the site. Ask them questions about what works and what doesn&#x27;t. Stop spying. You got all this damn money and you can&#x27;t be bothered to actually lift a finger to do some difficult work that involves interacting with all those &quot;dirty&quot; people out there. FFS most people would probably be happy to fill out a survey if it actually would impact the product in a positive way. Creepiness is creepy.

I&#x27;m not sure if this is actually how reCAPTCHA v2 works, but I&#x27;ve found moving my mouse and highlighting text immediately after ticking the box almost certainly passes the tests for human. I very rarely get asked to recognise images or pick X out of Y. When I don&#x27;t do this, i.e., I don&#x27;t move my mouse or highlight text on a page at random, I most certainly have to sit through a couple of screens of tests (I&#x27;m behind a shared IP with lots of users).<p>All this leads me to think mouse movements tracking is much more widespread.

According to lcamtuf[1] how people move mouse and use keyboard are unique per person, it&#x27;s your personal digital-fingerprint that can be transferred to track you elsewhere.<p>[1] From Book &quot;Silence on the Wire&quot;

I have a network meter on my xfce taskbar, and it shows uploads and downloads whenever I move my cursor on a website I view with a JS enabled browser. It&#x27;s almost all of them.

&gt; Facebook said that it tracks mouse movements to help its algorithm distinguish between humans and bots.<p>Stupid cat and mouse game. How difficult would it be for a bot to simulate a human&#x27;s mouse movements? I suppose not very difficult.<p>Also, doesn&#x27;t this conflict with rare types of input devices? Or people with a motor function disability?<p>&gt; to also determine if the window is foregrounded or backgrounded<p>Shouldn&#x27;t there be an API for that?

Ironically, the more interested I am in part of a page the less likely my mouse is going to be over or even anywhere near it. I find the pointer distracting.<p>If I&#x27;m interested in the content of a page, I either swipe the mouse off to the edge of the screen or put it on an area of whitespace so I can scroll with the scroll wheel.<p>The thought that people are hovering their pointers over stuff they&#x27;re actively looking at strikes me as odd. Oh well.

This is beyond absurd. Why would you do that? What could go wrong? Is this a social network or spy agency?

This should be no surprise — received chat messages are marked as read on Facebook if you wiggle your mouse after a few minutes of inactivity.<p>To be fair, this makes sense from a UX standpoint. You don&#x27;t want messages to be marked as read if you have your window open but have walked away from the computer.

Earnest question from someone without much front-end knowledge: how is browser-based mouse tracking performed in a way that doesn&#x27;t significantly degrade performance?<p>Do they use some type of client-side library that caches data for a while and asynchronously uploads it occasionally? Or occasionally try to asynchronously sample the mouse position and just get a coarser set of data?<p>It seems like real-time requests that respond to mouse changes would create huge performance problems and&#x2F;or be easily stopped with browser extensions.

&gt; We collect information from and about the computers, phones, <i>connected TVs</i> [emphasis mine]<p>Personally, I find this even more disturbing. Does this &quot;only&quot; apply to TVs where a user is logged on, or are they also building shadow profiles for any smart TV that comes with the Facebook App preloaded and is connected to the internet?<p>At least for Samsung and Sony, I can easily see them cooperating with Facebook for a negligible fee.

Lol @ the Facebook army astro-turfing the comment section.<p>&quot;But it&#x27;s not nefarious...&quot;<p>&quot;But everybody else is doing it too...&quot;<p>&quot;It&#x27;s not for surveillance, profiling and shadow profiling, pinky promise, trust us...&quot;

&quot;&quot;We collect information from and about the computers, phones, connected TVs and other web-connected devices users use that integrate with our Products, and we combine this information across different devices users use,&quot; Facebook wrote in the document adding that the collected information is used to &quot;give better personalize the content (including ads), to measure whether they took an action in response to an ad we showed them on their phone&quot;.&quot;<p>In other news, Google Tag Manager and crazyegg exist.

Is there even anything left that Facebook <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> track?

as does every person here using Mouseflow, LogRocket, or a dozen other off the shelf solutions. is this really that surprising?

Where I work we track: mouse movements, how long you spend on a specific page, the path that you took to get to a specific page, what you clicked, ip addresses, and basically all information included in the header of the request. We also screen shot everything from when you login to when you logout.

Um. This isn’t nefarious.<p>We’ve used inspectlet from time to time to help figure out where there are problems in our UI. It tracks mouse movements as part of a complete session. It’s been really helpful.

It isn&#x27;t just Facebook that has been doing this. Web development tools are able to track scroll and mouse movements as well, and have been used to test website usage

Every website that uses google analytics does this.

I assume from this they can infer if you&#x27;re left or right handed and store that in your profile.

The really sad thing is that all this data is not available for academic research. Instead of understanding human nature to make a better world, it is being used to make better targeted ads.

Does Facebook just grab everything they can? Does anybody know if they grab your device&#x27;s battery status, or gyroscopic data about how you are tilting&#x2F;holding your device?

Presumably Facebook can do this because Javascript gives up this information.<p>What&#x27;s the easiest way to hack your browser to give no information or dummy information here?

At this point Facebook can come out and say they track any and everything. They might as well because no one will do a single thing.

I remember just few years ago there was an article here about a website tracking mouse movement to predict what the user will click and pre-loading the content in the background. It was seen as a huge improvement to the experience and the comments section was full of people saying how cool it is. But hey, now facebook is doing it, so it&#x27;s suddenly the worst thing in the world?

Is there a more legitimate source for this announcement? Seems like HN has fallen prey to fake news.

Using mouse movements to detect that tab is inactive is an old trick. Compared to other facts, I think that tracking mouse movements is absolutely not a problem. Collecting things like IMEI or IP addresses needs more attention. For example, I think it is not necessary to keep IP addresses longer than week or two if you respect your users&#x27; privacy.

Every company and their mother is tracking mouse movements. How is this trending???

This is hardly interesting. A lot of websites have been doing this for a while. Just open your network console while you are browsing and you&#x27;ll see all the things they are tracking

&quot;Facebook confirms it receives your IP address!!!&quot;<p>We need a new science of hysterias. The internet provides ample data for robust analysis and prediction. Any takers?

<p><pre><code> document.body.addEventListener(&#x27;mouseenter&#x27;, e =&gt; { console.log(&#x27;this just in, erickj tracks mouse movements&#x27;); })</code></pre>

its just for security like he said to congress right?

thats great step towards security and privacy

Mark is tracking lots of user data

Does this allow detecting drug addicts and recommending treatment?

This seems like a reasonable thing to do to detect bots.

BREAKING NEWS: A free service on the web monitors how you use it.