I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people - I don’t think it’s unreasonable to know where people are clicking most.
Seems fairly sensible to figure out how to optimise the ui
>I don’t really have a problem with this - as long as it’s not tracking people
It is. Everything you do is being logged and categorized, and your automatically assigned device fingerprinted user UID (whether you've made an account or not), is associated to all of your actions. Those associations are then dumped into a data lake for data scientists to mine for marketing purposes, and to cross-reference your activities across other sites.
Much of what you describe is immoral and/or illegal in the EU. It's certainly not the case that every site is breaking the law this way. You can get 90% of the benefit of analytics with anonymized data.
Precisely. If anything, session recordings are one of the least invasive forms of tracking because they restrict data collection to what you do on the website you're visiting.
They don't record information typed into forms, e.g. addresses, emails, CC numbers. Well, some don't record by default, with others you have to specify that manually.
Either way, it's better than a Facebook or Twitter Like buttons that infest the web and connect your visits with that site to your Twitter/FB account.
Check out FullStory. It's a drop-in Javascript snippet (aka accessible to any marketing/design folks) that records the DOM and rebuilds it as a playable video in their backend as if you were doing a screenshare and recording it.
Seems fairly sensible to figure out how to optimise the ui