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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

How can you know what they've read inside an article? Sometimes I'll embed Hotjar and similar services into my site just to see the heatmap of what people have mouses over or text selected. Still looking for an open source self hosted version though.

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A far better question is: what does knowing let you do? Does it tell you how to be a better writer? Not really. Does it tell you want people want to read? Also not really, because you have no way to separate the "people spending time on a paragraph because it's high quality information" from "people spending time on a paragraph because it'll make for a good tweet quote".

If you care about your writing, then your aim is for people to read your whole post, not just parts of it. And you might think you want to know how much time people spent on your page (i.e. what your bump rate is) but even that tells you nothing: what are you going to do with that information? And that's not rhetorical: do you actually work on your writing based on whether people scroll past the fold? Because if you do, I'd love to hear what your workflow around that is.

Unless you're trying to monetize your readership through ad placements, analytics like these are a little lie we like to tell ourselves matter, when really they don't. They're nice to look at, but eye candy isn't a good enough reason to run tracking and behavioral profiling on a blog.

From the initial parent comment which also serves as my answer to your question:

> And much like profiling any program I’ve written, the hotspot is always something different from what I’d have expected. Having analytics doesn’t change what I write. I still enjoy the information.

I like seeing the hotspot so I know what to focus on in the future. It's really no different than in startups, let's say you build features A, B, and C, but most people are focusing on C, knowing that info ensures you better serve your users. For a blog, your user is your reader. You might say server level analytics might work, but just as in startups, it assumes that there is only one feature (or for blogs, only one idea) per page. Hence, intra-page analytics can be useful.

This to me is intrusive and creepy. Glad I can block Hotjar easily and do not wish to have to check for self-hosted scripts doing it.

Not sure you can block self hosted Hotjar type scripts if I just embed them into the JS bundle itself for the site. You could try disabling JS but most people won't, and I could also disallow text being rendered if there's no JS. Not that I would do any of this of course, since I like no JS sites as well as SEO for my blog posts, but it's a hypothetical of what one could potentially do.

Blocking XHR requests by default would probably be a good start before 1st party JS. I already default to blocking 3rd party content.

That's true, depends on the kind of blog though, and whether it's a SPA or not.

Because hotjar and other such things are incredibly invasive?

Well, it's my site and I can host whatever (legal) content I want on it, it's akin to having cameras in my store. Similarly, people can choose not to visit the site.

Or more likely, all of your cameras disabled by ublock.

It actually would be quite difficult for adblockers to block 1st party scripts if I just embed the tracking into my JS bundle. At that point the adblocker would have to deobfuscate the code and block selective parts of the JS.

Only if you self host or proxy all of the tracking requests. Otherwise, the tracking will occur but get trapped in the browser. The moment your code tries to send the request to hotjar or any other domain, it's blocked.

Yes, hence why I said in my initial comment that I'm looking for a self hosted version, mostly because Hotjar is bloated and has unnecessary amounts of extraneous JS that slows down the page.

Embedding intrusive tracking code that is invisible to the average user is not akin to a visible camera in a store, at all.

How is it different? Cameras can be invisible in a store too and often are.

It's a common understanding that CCTV exists. It's not a common understanding that this level of user tracking is happening.

and being in public visiting a store vs reading a website in the privacy of your own home are clearly very different situations.

Maybe it's not commonly understood but that is what is happening regardless. Being at home when reading content versus in public doesn't make any analogical sense because the internet is not a physical space, so it should have no bearing on your expectation of privacy if you visit someone else's site.

It's your anology about shopping in a store -vs- reading the web [anywhere, including in private].

>but that is what is happening regardless

So the justification is "everyone else is doing it" - OK.

Same with cameras in stores then, there is no expectation of privacy when entering a store, and similarly, there is none when visiting someone's server and website.

As already stated: most people are unaware of and do not expect this level of intrusive behaviour tracking. I don't think I can be any clearer on this point.

Enough going around in circles.

I'm just stating that the justification is not "because everyone else does it," because you could say the same about stores. That is why I mentioned that they are not "clearly very different situations" as you said, they are the same situation; one is going to a place that is not theirs so they have no expectation of privacy. Just because one is in cyberspace and the other is in meatspace doesn't mean that they are necessarily different in analogy.

That people know about this type of tracking with stores and do not with websites is not my problem, and at best, they should be educated about that, and indeed we have laws against this exact thing, such as CFAA, and no judge will let you off the hook just because you said it was in cyberspace and not meatspace that you invaded someone else's servers. Therefore, both are analogously the same.

Not your problem and someone else should educate people about what you're actively choosing to do, got it.

That is correct, people not knowing about CCTV is not the problem of the store. At best, they could have a sign stating so but are not obligated to do so.

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