Having recently developed a piece of javascript that will record
users' mouse trails across my website, I became concerned about the
ethics of doing such a thing. Searching the interweb has not returned
many comments on the subject - there's a pharmacutical company that
mentions that they may be able to tell if you're mentally disabled if
you use their tracking demo, some references to a book by Lawrence
Lessig, and brief information about a site mapping data about
mouse-movements to biometric measurements to work out you age and sex.

But what else? Has there been any big debate anywhere about the ethics
of this? A public outcry about an advertiser doing this? Any papers
published about the ethics of doing it? Is it an invasion of privacy,
and if so, why?

Please note: I'm not looking for answers about what I'd need to put in
my privacy policy before doing it, rather, I'm looking for debate on
the subject, and the privacy implications.

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Request for Question Clarification by xemion-ga on 09 Sep 2002 17:17 PDT

I would also have to agree with the below comments.  This issue really
isn't considered important and I don't believe it's really been
debated.  If I might ask, why do you even want to track your users
mouse movements?  That might shed a little more light on what to look
for.

xemion-ga

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Clarification of Question by pete_sergeant-ga on 09 Sep 2002 22:29 PDT

In reply to xemion-ga's request for clarification:

Mouse-tracking is useful both as a way to collect marketing data (
which ads did the user float over? which ads were interacted with? )
and for usability ( did they think that was a link? how did they read
the text? ).

As mentioned, some people consider this a gross invasion of privacy (
ref: Lawrence Lessig ), and I'm fairly convinced that Slashdot (
http://www.slashdot.org ) ran an article on a site that was doing it,
although I can't seem to find the magic keywords needed to retrieve
this story.

To add to the debate, I think any site tracking my mouse movements
would not cause me concern. I feel there are other factors of greater
concern such as IP recording, referral URL, looking at my cookies, and
the enviromental data in my browser; - mouse tracking seems quite low
in the list.
regards
lot-ga

I agree with my colleague lot-ga. The tracking of mouse movements
doesn't particularly bother me. I cannot see how this data could be
used in any way that would seriously invade my privacy.

If someone comes up with truly accurate age and gender information
from this, I will be astonished. Various physical handicaps and other
non-sex- and non-age-related factors would, I think, make it very
difficult to use this data in any meaningful fashion.

I am quite spastic, and my mouse movements may be erratic because of
chronic illness, but I am not mentally disabled nor extremely old.
Anything that my mouse movements say about me is likely to be in
error.

This is the  address of the article originally a BBC story posted to slashdot 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1528426.stm