> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
I'm sorry to say this but as a part of the community maybe I should state my opinion. I don't really agree with this policy strictly. If there is some shillage in the comment section, it's perfectly fine to email admins, but I think it's also beneficial for the community bring it up. I personally find it hard to realize legitimate shillage sometimes, and appreciate it when my friends bring it up. I don't know why admins should access more information about what we see than we do.
"Everyone else is doing it" is totally a valid thing to point out here. It means that, while you can get up in arms about it, you need to get up in arms about the practice industry-wide, using the facebook name to make it sound worse than it is makes this either dishonest or ill-informed.
It's a lot easier to get one company (or person) to stop a practice only they do than it is to get them to stop doing something that everyone else does too.
Not sure I agree, there is a difference between a private company that can collect covert private data on over 2/3 of the US population, and one that has access to a handful of users.
Facebook has ties to and influence over government, it is so big and far reaching that I feel it's right to be more concerned about FB doing something like this than other smaller players.
The scale of FB is what makes it a special case.
However, I think that the proper approach to something like this is educating users. Companies are gonna capture your mouse movements, it's not something we should legislate over, but users should be informed as to what it means to give companies like Facebook information about yourself.
Worrying about mouse movements when you freely send clear text messages to their data pile about your most intimate feelings and thoughts is ass-backwards.
While its fine to point out, it is not fine to use as a reason not to take action. It sort of sounds like you're saying we can't hold any company accountable for anything if at least x% of their competitors are doing it.
Going after the largest offenders and making a big splash is more effective than doing nothing until you can get every company to simultaneously stop something.
>using the facebook name to make it sound worse than it is makes this either dishonest or ill-informed
No. Not only does facebook not get cover from "everyone else is doing it," they are actively perpetuating that cover existing for others. They are one of a few entities with the weight to set "industry standard" simply by changing their practices.
>while you can get up in arms about it, you need to get up in arms about the practice industry-wide
>> I guess mouse movements are a very good way to identify people across websites.
I absolutely not believe that. for real. this is something i keep reading but a seriously not see how mouse movement can be unique from one person to another. it's not a fingerprint come on.
> It's also an efficient way to distinguish people from machines.
I wonder to what degree DPI settings, tracking speed, and acceleration influence this. People will move their mice differently depending on how fast the cursor goes, and it's cursor movement that's being tracked, not physical mouse position.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html