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I was going to write a sarcastic comment about how great this is for me as a user, but I can’t do it.

How is this not a total violation of users’ expectation of privacy? Why doesn’t the page even mention the ethics of subjecting people to total surveillance to sell them more crap?

2 comments

Hi tobr, thanks for your thoughtful comment and for not writing a sarcastic reply.

This platform is for remote usability testing [https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/remote-te...], so all parties are usually aware of what's going on. It requires the user to install client software on their phone.

The current alternative is video recordings, which is more invasive. This is mentioned on the website, and described in detail in the paper on the website.

Thank you for clarifying this, and sorry for jumping to conclusions. To be honest, the website is written more like you're targeting users in general:

> Remotion is a new way of replaying behavior of people visiting your website or application.

If it is done with informed consent in a research situation, that's not a problem, but this read to me like a way to play back web analytics.

One thing people don't realize is that a lot of web analytics software already do "session recording". So it can playback every wiggle of your mouse, every scroll, every keystroke, etc.

You can see some creepy demos here:

https://www.inspectlet.com/

https://www.fullstory.com/

Most of them don't record orientation events though. These are very noisy, vary wildly between devices, create an endless stream of data - and are difficult (if possible at all) to derive any useful insight from.