Click (2016)

https://clickclickclick.click/

by andrewzeno • 2 months ago

370 95 2 months ago

clickclickclick.click

jamiek88• 2 months ago

Hmmm. Clever and a little spooky!

maxverse• 2 months ago

I enjoyed playing with this. Wild how much it knows.

hspeiser• 2 months ago

thats pretty creepy. I find it unnerving that they know exactly where my cursor is.

rolph• 2 months ago

would be creepiest if your cursor moved somewhere related to what you were saying outloud.

the capability is there, your local hardware determines how seamless it would be.

nomel• 2 months ago

I made something related to this with whisper. It would just constantly listen and periodically do a search to find a picture/video/gif from the web, relevant to what you're talking about, and show it.

ProAm2• 2 months ago

So does every advertiser and data broker in the world

LeoPanthera• 2 months ago

You might like Pointer Pointer. It's pretty funny. https://pointerpointer.com

(It might not work on touch screens.)

_carbyau_• 2 months ago

And yet, so many people think Cursor-camp[0] is great.

Mental framing of a tech is weird.

[0]https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/

preinheimer• 2 months ago

Heads up: there's audio. It does add something.

claysmithr• 2 months ago

kind of weirded me out lol...

busymom0• 2 months ago

I am not sure what I am looking at. It's telling me things which I expect any website to know via basic javascript. What am I missing?

layer8• 2 months ago

That you’re not the target audience.

10000truths• 2 months ago

I'm getting a PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR when I try to open the page in Firefox on Linux.

ProAm2• 2 months ago

This is a great POC about how you give up privacy just using the web. This data is bought and sold and more and used against you every day

BudaDude• 2 months ago

Nice! It shouted "Bot" when I ran this in the console

for (let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { document.querySelector(".button")?.click(); }

jagged-chisel2• 2 months ago

Used this and it replied (in the console): "Such a smart subject."

ETA: It also took a few seconds to get around to telling me (from the bottom up):

    Subject has clicked on the button a thousand times.
    Subject has clicked on the button one hundred times.
    Subject clicks less than most other subjects.
    Subject has run script to click on the button ten times within one second.
    Subject has clicked on the button nine times within one second.
    Subject has clicked on the button eight times within one second.

I wonder if it can distinguish between human clicks and scripted clicks if it's saying "...clicks less than most..." or if everyone is scripting a million clicks.

sheept• 2 months ago

It can[0] but I'm not sure if it's using that for the comparison.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTru...

d4rkp4ttern• 2 months ago

Another one like this -

https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken

foxfired• 2 months ago

I've always added analytics scripts on websites I worked on. It was second nature for me. Then when I got my own start up, I didn't just add regular analytics but one that tracks mouse movements so you can watch sessions back like a video [0].

I told a friend about my start up and she jumped on it immediately. I opened the tool and watched her interaction. Then I told her "oh so you opened the dev tools" She immediately ended the session. "How did you know? That's creepy". It was the first time I've actually felt like these tools invade privacy.

Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page, but I don't think users truly grasp how those tools work. I understand that all analytics tools provide this feature now, but its always creepy to know someone can watch what you are doing.

[0] https://idiallo.com/blog/spying-on-your-user

htx80nerd• 2 months ago

Everyone knows stores have security cameras. But if you called them up and said 'I saw you pick up the chips' they wouldnt have a good feeling.

Everyone understands websites use analytics and tracking, but people dont want to be reminded of it. Which is why people hate those FB ads which exactly match what you searched for 24 hours ago.

philipwhiuk• 2 months ago

Everyone understands websites use analytics and tracking, but people dont want to be reminded of it.

People don't want it to be misused is the actual point.

jrowen2• 2 months ago

I think there's a very interesting duality forming around privacy. It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday, as long as it's aggregated and going through automated systems. But as soon as it feels like an actual person is looking at individual behavior, it's creepy (which is, of course, always a possibility, but plausible deniability is a powerful thing).

m463• 2 months ago

it's not a duality at all. the people don't know.

the people doing the "analytics" (surveillance) like their privacy too, because they are doing creepy stuff and don't want people to know it. And even if they aren't doing creepy stuff, the data might be used that way in the future (profile building, psychological tricks, personalized pricing, sharing behavior with others, etc)

latexr• 2 months ago

It seems like most people don't really care if they're being filmed, or if their data is being slurped up six ways from Sunday

For the majority of people I don’t think it’s true that they don’t care, but rather that they don’t know, don’t understand the implications, or don’t have the luxury of being able to do anything about it.

In the instances where I was able to have a longer discussion with someone to really explain what’s going on, they did care. Even if they previously said they didn’t.

singpolyma3• 2 months ago

Yes. This is it. People are used to "private conversation in public restaurant". It's not private because no one can hear, but because no one is listening.

raverbashing• 2 months ago

Yes - also it's one thing to say "A user entered the site, clicked here than here" (analyzed in bulk) and another "this specific guy entered the site, clicked here than here"

iamacyborg• 2 months ago

Which is wild because the aggregation and “big data” element is where the harm actually happens in very real terms. Of course, much harder to explain to typical laymen.

miki123211• 2 months ago

The other side of this is that there are aspects of privacy that average people absolutely care about, but that the tech crowd largely ignores.

It's things like hiding your online activity from your partner / boss / parent / ex, making sure nobody knows you just went to a gay club, hiding the fact that you're playing video games from that one guy you don't actually want to play with, not giving out your phone number to the parents of your students, that sort of thing.

For most people, E2E and VPNs are useless gimmicks that just make life unnecessarily difficult, but vanishing messages and incognito mode are life-saving features.

Sophira3• 2 months ago

Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page

Please be honest with yourself. People don't read terms and conditions. There's a good chance you don't read terms and conditions. And even if you do, odds are better than even that you don't fully understand all the legal implications.

Terms and conditions pages nowadays are there mostly to provide legal protection under the guise of "the user told us that they read these by ticking a box on our signup page; it's hardly our fault if they didn't."

dheera2• 2 months ago

I'm also of the opinion that at lot of T&C are basically signing under duress and I consider them invalid. Like if I have to sign a T&C with Google Play and a T&C with your city's sanctioned parking app in order to park on the street, I consider both of those T&C's invalid. As a legal resident of the country with a legally owned car and legal driving license, I should be able to park and pay, I shouldn't have to agree to anything else.

account423• 2 months ago

We really need to update all relevant laws to the same standard as GDPR's "informed consent" where hiding something in a wall of legalese doesn't cut it.

wrRS• 2 months ago

Are there any good browser extensions that can block this and protect user privacy?

hactually• 2 months ago

yes - a fair few

matheusmoreira3• 2 months ago

uBlock Origin should block it.

matheusmoreira3• 2 months ago

Yeah, we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page

Nobody reads that stuff.

Rygian• 2 months ago

we include it in our terms and condition and privacy page, but I don't think users truly grasp how those tools work

Since you did collect the metrics, you had direct knowledge of how many users opened the T&C and scrolled down to the place where you mention you're recording their session.

Would be interesting if you can share an aggregate statistic of that.

kmoser• 2 months ago

They may have scrolled down to it but that doesn't mean they read it. And even if they read it, they may not have understood it.

ivanjermakov• 2 months ago

I'm surprised browsers don't warn users about every website that has listeners attached to keyboard/mouse events. It's totally fine for something like a game or an experiment website, but might not be something you expect from a blog or a news site.

account423• 2 months ago

At some point we really need to split websites from web applications as a concept.

XCSme• 2 months ago

Ethical question: is there a huge difference between seeing the dev tools being opened in a re-created session replay AND simply storing an event with [dev_tools_opened at 1min 3s].

If you have only the event, you can basically re-create a playback of that action if you want.

Now, if you track all actions of interest, than that's basically almost the same as a full session recording.

CSMastermind• 2 months ago

This brings me back to the glory days of StumbleUpon. Highly recommend.

ge962• 2 months ago

I was thinking of the paper clip universe simulator game

Where you're just sitting there clicking over and over

RetroTechie• 2 months ago

Aka incremental game

briandw• 2 months ago

Very fun, I enjoyed seeing what it would react to.

gblargg• 2 months ago

I was disappointed that it didn't catch me editing the HTML when I tried changing the button's class to button2 or adding other classes. I wanted it to call me out when I clicked after that edit.

herpdyderp• 2 months ago

Looks like it got HN’d to death

mrkn13• 2 months ago

I made something very similar 2 weeks ago, re the upcoming OpenAI phone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040327

danielrmay• 2 months ago

This is really neat, and disturbing.

mrkn13• 2 months ago

thank you and alas yes, the image understand is the only LLM, the rest has been available on browsers through js since the 2000s

ZeWaka• 2 months ago

The image processing is neat. Local model ran in the browser?

mrkn13• 2 months ago

thank you! actually it's an API call to a VL model on Deepinfra (model is Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct)

grumpymuppet• 2 months ago

As a semi-savvy programmer, but with little experience in web-dev, I'm actually a bit ignorant of what a site can measure -- client side -- versus collect server side.

Presumably it's a simple matter to send something back to a server, but I've really never thought about the mechanisms involved.

Barbing2• 2 months ago

Awesome. Looking for this as an iOS app, since I learned dismissing notifications phones home. (Useful feature for multidevice cloud services but can be creepy, companies learning the notifications we expand or leftswipe away… learning our sleep schedules and preferences and all that in ways we might not have specifically expected in this exact case)

Apps know when we’re on WiFi, when we force quit, have potential to have motion sensor access if opting in…

Not sure the presentation needed for acceptance into the App Store. As a security checkup tool or something…

pixelmelt• 2 months ago

Try blackbox, its a puzzle game that will have you messing with device settings to beat levels

Barbing2• 2 months ago

ooh neat! (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blackbox/id962969578)

Sophira3• 2 months ago

I'm guessing this is supposed to illustrate how tracking is ubiquitous, given what I see in the source code.

In my case, though, after carefully enabling only scripts from the site and the Cloudflare CDN, but not enabling XHR/websockets back to the source page, or any cookies, the only thing that happens for me is:

1. I see a button and an exhortation to click the button.

2. I click the button.

3. The site goes "Subject has clicked the button."

4. The site goes "...".

...and then nothing else happens, no matter where I click or move my mouse. In the background I can see attempted websocket connections, but I'm blocking those so they can't happen.

If the aim of the game is to open people's eyes to the dangers of online tracking, it feels like there should be a reward mechanism if such tracking is blocked!

jagged-chisel2• 2 months ago

I unlocked at least one "achievement" by blocking camera access.

dang• 2 months ago

Related. Others?

Click (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841679 - May 2023 (35 comments)

Click - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26518290 - March 2021 (243 comments)

Click click click - A browser-based game on online profiling. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18636038 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)

A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985644 - Nov 2016 (165 comments)

xiaoluolyg• 2 months ago

clever

zhxiaoliang2• 2 months ago

It was the spring of 1993. UPS dropped a huge package at my door. It was Visual C++ 1.0 in a 50-story-high white box that weighed a ton. I spent the whole day reading manuals and messing with it. When my wife came home that night, I couldn't wait to show her what I finally managed to pull off -- a maximized window that contained a single button that filled the entire space of that window. And the label said "Click Me." My wife clicked that button, and nothing happened.

"What's the point?" she asked.

I said, "You can click it."

"But what's the big deal?" she was baffled.

"You can click it,“ I said.

“That's the big deal."

jml7c5• 2 months ago

That reminds me of this story, from developing for the Playstation:

In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.
Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.
“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”

https://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745

zhxiaoliang2• 2 months ago

That’s a cool story! Thx for sharing. Back then programming was rough, but the sense of accomplishment from completing even simple tasks was real and rewarding.

pokpokpok• 2 months ago

I show this in my interface programming class to introduce people to the concept of input events.

Thinking of input as a series of discrete events is an interesting cognitive model that many experienced programmers take for granted!

neuroelectron• 2 months ago

I seem to be getting random events that have nothing to do with my activity. I'm on Brave on an iPad mini. I'm guessing the JS activity looks like fingerprinting and it's being spoofed.

alexwwang• 2 months ago

what does it make for?

nihapmrm• 2 months ago

It’s making me feel like I’m being tracked 24/7 :)

michaelevensen• 2 months ago

Roel and Luna?!

agys• 2 months ago

This is another gem by Amsterdam based Studio Moniker, the guys behind “Radio Garden”.

Some of my favorite projects:

https://studiomoniker.com/projects/radio-garden

https://studiomoniker.com/projects/do-not-touch

https://studiomoniker.com/projects/do-not-draw-a-penis

lovegrenoble• 2 months ago

Just as fun as Poke, poke, poke... https://calm.ovh

pranshuchittora• 2 months ago

Peak unemployment ;)

ivolimmen• 2 months ago

I can clearly hear a fellow countryman. There is something very distinctive when Dutch people speak English. Very nice website. Very informative.

tommit• 2 months ago

sübject has clicked the bütton

or ist it more of an ö? (im German btw but can also definitely spot a dutch English speaker :) best way to tell is to have them say "I have an idea!"

adychandra• 2 months ago

Avast is flagging website as malicious

mwigdahl• 2 months ago

Is it capturing and selling user data? Avast would certainly know.

MagnoApi• 2 months ago

Cool website

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/socket.io/1.7.3/socket...

http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/1.18.0/TweenMax.m...

Some of the Javascript is served via plain HTTP as well as HTTPS

https://clickclickclick.click/bundle.js

This is 14 MB of Javascript

Using HTTP/1.1, the norm in 2016, I counted 233 chunks

Might as well just ask the user to download a 15 MB executable, e.g., a "game", and run it

Developers often refer to this idea of the "browser sandbox" but there are lots of things that are permitted inside this "sandbox" that some users would consider part of their "threat model"

For example, gratuitous data collection, surveillance and advertising

Click (2016)

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