alt Hacker NewsI wonder what people think about session replay, ethically. Is it okay to do? Do you think visitors should be informed about it? Would you use a website differently if there was a big red banner saying your cursor movements and viewport are being livestreamed to HQ?
Genuinely curious, because it's not something I think most people are aware of when they browse the web.
I've worked on such a product for ~8 years (one of the most widely adopted ones) and find that most of these sessions are used in practice to fix bugs or improve UX by such a vast majority that even if there's some voyeuristic aspect I don't think it's super important to care about. The product I worked on made no effort to try and bypass ad blockers or browser settings like DNT, and a lot of sophisticated users wouldn't be recorded anyway due to those settings. We didn't even do any fingerprinting and auto-masked all fields. Overall it was less privacy invading than walking in a shop while being recorded by a security camera in my opinion. I don't work in this field anymore but would do it again.