Re:Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements
by amelius on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @06:12AM
(#17301765)
Also don't forget that Facebook probably has to do all detection in Javascript on the client, i.e. with limited resources. I suspect they don't send every mouse-movement to the server. This also means they probably don't have fine-grained historical data.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements
by Klathmon on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @06:26AM
(#17301824)
Not necessarily.
I've only given it a few minutes thought, but position and time data is really small, and easy to compress (you don't need to send anything while the user isn't moving the mouse). If it's sent in batches or over an already open websocket, it's not like it's using a ton of resources on the client.
Assuming all of their users (guessing a billion daily active users) are on desktop half of the time (a wildly incorrect assumption I'm sure), and the mouse position data is 1mb per person for the data you care about (which again, seems like a lot), that's 500tb.
For $25k you could store it all. That's nothing compared to the benefits of being able to identify bots on your platform.
Re:Facebook confirms that it tracks mouse movements
by taurine on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @11:08AM
(#17303778)
Yes, the standard way to do this a few years back for conversion optimization, was to RLE compress and send the data in intervals. Also the resolution/measurement does not need to be in the milliseconds.