gmail is evil – sends mouse movements back to mothership
I was playing around with the Tamper Data plugin for firefox which lets you monitor traffic while loading webpages. I was playing around on gmail and quickly noticed somthing which I thought was a bit disturbing. It seems that gmail monitors where your mouse is and if the gmail window is in focus or not — and constantly is sending state changes back to google. I suppose that by using google, you agree to some level of monitoring for targeted advertising — but monitoring where I mover the mouse and how often I have gmail in the foreground seems a bit totally creapy. All a bit too big brother if you ask me.
POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=i&req0_time=293131&req0_evtype=mousemove
POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=1
POSTDATA=count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=0
Would you be willing to present this at 090909? Very surprising. How do they send mouse position?
I didn’t dig into all that was being sent, just surprised at the wealth of information that is being sent. And the findings don’t seem really relevant to new media..