OPINION18 March 2011

Attracting unwanted attention

A company has launched with a web analytics tool that promises to turn advertisers into ‘Peeping Toms’. That’s not exactly the image the industry needs to convey to stay on the right side of legislators.

You might have noticed a bit of a fuss being made recently about online privacy. Apparently some people are uncomfortable with the idea that companies can track what sites they visit and what they do within those sites.

Legislators have responded with proposals to restrict data collection, or at least make more visible to consumers what data is being collected, while the industry tries to reassure web users that it’s not spying on them, merely trying to understand them better to present them with more relevant content.

Then we have Use It Better, a start-up company based in Poland, which has developed a tool to record user interactions with Flash websites – and proudly boasts that it can turn “advertisers and digital agencies into Peeping Toms to improve user experience”.

That’s so far off-message as to be impressive.

Brian Tarran

@RESEARCH LIVE

2 Comments

Lukasz

14 years ago

Hi Brian, allow me to address your concerns. The idea of recording visits on the website is not new. There are already services like Clicktale, Userfly that do that on HTML websites. Use It Better is the first one to do that on Flash websites. Of course PR release title was meant to be controversial to get us more attention but in fact there's not much of controversy in this. Neither we nor others record any fragile data that may lead to identifying a user without wider context. We don't record IP numbers and any text inputed in texfields is obfuscated. What analytics now about a visit is just where a user pointed his mouse and what he clicked. It's far less disturbing than behavioural targeting not to mention cams in stores that record when I pick my nose. Analyzing real visitors activity gives better results than laboratory test and we really believe that it can be leveraged for a good purpose and user will benefit from this having better experience using web (which is often not that good after all). best, Lukasz

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Rock 'Em Sock 'Em JBot

14 years ago

I hope you wash your hands before you send me your software....

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