ClickTale: Where’s the Consent?

TechCrunch blogs about a new tool that lets website proprietors watch what their users do. And I do mean watch. They provide “movies of users’ individual browsing sessions” including all mouse movement, clicks, and keystrokes. They also aggregate data to provide overall statistics.

These types of tools are often used in usability studies to make websites more accessible or information easier to find. However, in usability studies, there is full disclosure and the participants are usually paid.

The interesting point is that this service will be made available to everyone and not only to big corporations greedy in user stats. ClickTale is a hosted service, so no installation is needed on the server-side or client-side and setup takes only a few minutes. Webmasters add a small piece of javascript code to their webpages. The javascript collects browsing data and transmits it to the ClickTale servers for processing. ClickTale creates movies of browsing sessions almost instantaneously and webmasters can log-in securely at anytime to view these movies. This point is important: Indeed the technology is site centric, meaning not based on a panel of users but on the site total active user base.

It’s nice to think about this in terms of usability and bloggers and indie websites, but in reality how is ClickTale going to make money? Through its relationship with enterprise customers. I am sure that the free package is only the tip of the iceberg, and that paid customers get far more advanced user tracking tools. Ouriel at TechCrunch mentions the privacy features: only website owners can view the results, no personal information is tracked, no password tracking.

But there is no consent and no means to inform the user that they are tracked. While a few people voice privacy concerns on the comments to this entry, the responses are:
1. Privacy’s dead, get over it –and
2. That is a niche user preference.

Arik from ClickTale says in the comments:

LOL. You might be surprised but most of the users are not concerned by this like you do. This is a personal preference and we respect that. There is an option to install a cookie that will disable the service for you (more on this in our soon to be released privacy policy), or you can use whatever tools that you are familiar with if you don’t like cookies.

Again, privacy is reduced to a boutique concern of a small number of users. This is unbelievably irresponsible and I have no problem calling ClickTale out on that. There are plenty of ways they could require informed consent from users, but they know that marketers far prefer users not to know about tracking, because users will then opt out. These types of technologies should not be opt-out in the first place, and I am curious how this will fly in the EU where privacy rights are more strict than they are in the United States (which has some of the weakest privacy rights in the world).

BTW, as I’ve written about before, “personal information” does somehow not include IP addresses. But an IP address is a perfectly legitimate personal identifier (just ask the RIAA) and it’s specious to think otherwise.

The argument “privacy is dead anyway” is a straw man. Privacy rights have diminished greatly in the United States because people don’t know that most privacy violations are going on, people don’t know what their rights are, and because the government has not legislated any sort of privacy protections. If these things changed, we could have a greater expectation of privacy. To say “there’s nothing we can do” ignores the fact that we are going to see more technologies like this which are increasingly intrusive and problematic.

My solution would be legislative, since neither marketers nor technology companies seem to be able to follow an internal code of ethics. Similar to anti-spam laws, technologies which track user data should a) notify the user and b) require consent to proceed. I also believe that tracking cookies (like DoubleClick) violate privacy, and this type of requirement would cover those as well.

Now off my high horse. I have to catch up with go fug yourself.

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