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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

No personal information is asked, so the dataset will be pretty useless for monetization (you could just computationally generate a couple of thousand of responses and pretend it was the real deal).

uBlock Origin blocked one weird tracker-like third-party I didn't recognize: fullstory.com. The rest were the usual Google analytics crap.

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Marcos here, one of the members of the team behind this. Fullstory is to understand this project as a product and to see where it needs to be improved (because users don't understand or try to do things that we didn't considered, etc.). Only personal data (mail) is asked for those interested to stay in the loop in some way. The dataset without those emails will be on Github soon :)

Why not just add a link add the end or in a footer where users can submit suggestions and report bugs? When you are engaging users in mental health related questions, any tracking is suspect and creepy.

In my experience, users don't report minor UX flaws.

These kind of recording services can show, for example, users rage clicking what looks like a button for a couple seconds before finding the real button.

For startups that don't have the resources to line up tons of user testing sessions where you watch the product being used, these can help make a less frustrating experience for users.

Why ask the company name if the intent is to be anonymous? Many companies just the role name and company name is enough to identify the individual. Maybe there is only one CTO or Cloud Architect, etc. Or maybe gender + role + company is enough to identify.

It's simple enough to enter in "Noneya Business, Inc" for the company field.

I finished the survey and clicked "get my personal results" - email is required to receive the results, but you can "Join" without providing an email.

fullstory records your entire session, which can be really useful for developers and UX folks to investigate bugs or better understand how people are using your site.

It's also super creepy.

Ew. Good thing uBlock Origin blocks it then.

And here I was wondering if I should start Tor, as I usually do when doing anything health or politics related, but thought I was maybe being paranoid for something upvoted on HN...

UI session recording services are incredibly common across all kinds of services. Inspectlet, Glassbox are two others I am aware of, but there are no doubt more. They also probably exist for mobile apps.

I caught that too. Good thing the test still worked with the trackers blocked.

Ah, I took this quiz on my iPhone, luckily my pihole caught the trackers. I have a pretty extensive hosts list I use with the PiHole (full story included): https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/

They could use your IP address or some tracking cookies to link this data to a bunch of other data. Potentially.

- use incognito to avoid trackers

- use proxy / vpn

- resize your window if you are still scared

What effect does resizing your window have?

a little help to bypass tracking by fingerprinting

Doesn't it make things even more unique? How many people have a 1347×712 px window open?

No, if u keep changing frequently!

"Has a non-standard window size" still really narrows the search space, and there's still your desktop resolution that might be super unique if you have a laptop and a desk monitor at an offset.

No. Use the Tor Browser. The manual hacks do very little.

One nightmare / conspiracy theory scenario is they sell it to potential employers, recruiters, job search web sites, etc. and send them the signal "don't hire this person; they're burnt out".

But a job switch could help the burnout.

The IP address (therefore city and country) and browser data already says a lot.

At this point, it's just 0.0.0.0/0 and Chrome

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