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  • Hacker News
  • This is a great POC about how you give up privacy just using the web. This data is bought and sold and more and used against you every day
  • I enjoyed playing with this. Wild how much it knows.
  • I made something very similar 2 weeks ago, re the upcoming OpenAI phone.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040327

  • This is really neat, and disturbing.
  • The image processing is neat. Local model ran in the browser?
  • Awesome. Looking for this as an iOS app, since I learned dismissing notifications phones home. (Useful feature for multidevice cloud services but can be creepy, companies learning the notifications we expand or leftswipe away… learning our sleep schedules and preferences and all that in ways we might not have specifically expected in this exact case)

    Apps know when we’re on WiFi, when we force quit, have potential to have motion sensor access if opting in…

    Not sure the presentation needed for acceptance into the App Store. As a security checkup tool or something…

  • Try blackbox, its a puzzle game that will have you messing with device settings to beat levels
  • I seem to be getting random events that have nothing to do with my activity. I'm on Brave on an iPad mini. I'm guessing the JS activity looks like fingerprinting and it's being spoofed.
  • I can clearly hear a fellow countryman. There is something very distinctive when Dutch people speak English. Very nice website. Very informative.
  • sübject has clicked the bütton

    or ist it more of an ö? (im German btw but can also definitely spot a dutch English speaker :) best way to tell is to have them say "I have an idea!"

  • This brings me back to the glory days of StumbleUpon. Highly recommend.
  • I was thinking of the paper clip universe simulator game

    Where you're just sitting there clicking over and over

    by ge96
  • Heads up: there's audio. It does add something.
  • It was the spring of 1993. UPS dropped a huge package at my door. It was Visual C++ 1.0 in a 50-story-high white box that weighed a ton. I spent the whole day reading manuals and messing with it. When my wife came home that night, I couldn't wait to show her what I finally managed to pull off -- a maximized window that contained a single button that filled the entire space of that window. And the label said "Click Me." My wife clicked that button, and nothing happened.

    "What's the point?" she asked.

    I said, "You can click it."

    "But what's the big deal?" she was baffled.

    "You can click it,“ I said.

    “That's the big deal."

  • That reminds me of this story, from developing for the Playstation:

    >In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.

    >Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

    >“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

    https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745

  • Nice! It shouted "Bot" when I ran this in the console

    for (let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { document.querySelector(".button")?.click(); }

  • Used this and it replied (in the console): "Such a smart subject."

    ETA: It also took a few seconds to get around to telling me (from the bottom up):

        Subject has clicked on the button a thousand times.
        Subject has clicked on the button one hundred times.
        Subject clicks less than most other subjects.
        Subject has run script to click on the button ten times within one second.
        Subject has clicked on the button nine times within one second.
        Subject has clicked on the button eight times within one second.
    
    I wonder if it can distinguish between human clicks and scripted clicks if it's saying "...clicks less than most..." or if everyone is scripting a million clicks.
  • Related. Others?

    Click (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841679 - May 2023 (35 comments)

    Click - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26518290 - March 2021 (243 comments)

    Click click click - A browser-based game on online profiling. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636038 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)

    A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985644 - Nov 2016 (165 comments)

    by dang
  • I've always added analytics scripts on websites I worked on. It was second nature for me. Then when I got my own start up, I didn't just add regular analytics but one that tracks mouse movements so you can watch sessions back like a video [0].

    I told a friend about my start up and she jumped on it immediately. I opened the tool and watched her interaction. Then I told her "oh so you opened the dev tools" She immediately ended the session. "How did you know? That's creepy". It was the first time I've actually felt like these tools invade privacy.

    Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page, but I don't think users truly grasp how those tools work. I understand that all analytics tools provide this feature now, but its always creepy to know someone can watch what you are doing.

    [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/spying-on-your-user

  • Are there any good browser extensions that can block this and protect user privacy?
    by wrRS
  • Ethical question: is there a huge difference between seeing the dev tools being opened in a re-created session replay AND simply storing an event with [dev_tools_opened at 1min 3s].

    If you have only the event, you can basically re-create a playback of that action if you want.

    Now, if you track all actions of interest, than that's basically almost the same as a full session recording.

  • > Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page

    Nobody reads that stuff.

  • > Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page

    Please be honest with yourself. People don't read terms and conditions. There's a good chance you don't read terms and conditions. And even if you do, odds are better than even that you don't fully understand all the legal implications.

    Terms and conditions pages nowadays are there mostly to provide legal protection under the guise of "the user told us that they read these by ticking a box on our signup page; it's hardly our fault if they didn't."

  • I'm surprised browsers don't warn users about every website that has listeners attached to keyboard/mouse events. It's totally fine for something like a game or an experiment website, but might not be something you expect from a blog or a news site.
  • Everyone knows stores have security cameras. But if you called them up and said 'I saw you pick up the chips' they wouldnt have a good feeling.

    Everyone understands websites use analytics and tracking, but people dont want to be reminded of it. Which is why people hate those FB ads which exactly match what you searched for 24 hours ago.

  • > we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page, but I don't think users truly grasp how those tools work

    Since you did collect the metrics, you had direct knowledge of how many users opened the T&C and scrolled down to the place where you mention you're recording their session.

    Would be interesting if you can share an aggregate statistic of that.

  • I think there's a very interesting duality forming around privacy. It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday, as long as it's aggregated and going through automated systems. But as soon as it feels like an actual person is looking at individual behavior, it's creepy (which is, of course, always a possibility, but plausible deniability is a powerful thing).