Watchsend (YC S13) records mobile screen interactions for user testing
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
[0] "We take privacy seriously. You can choose to hide sensitive information, only record certain sections of your app, or even pixelate out all text entirely."
Edit: added source of claim
Edit 2: To clarify: I don't mean to diminish the hard work of the team. I know how hard it is to put your work out there and I'm sure there was a lot of interesting technical work that went in to it. That said, I really think the premise is troubling, especially if it is intended beyond a "beta tester" group. Even with the best intentions, this is a really powerful tool that could be easily abused.
What they are saying is that assuming that you are a good dev and care about privacy, the tools they provide to preserve privacy (ie pixelating text out) show that they care too.
What we mean by "we take privacy seriously" is that we work really hard to make sure that devs who care about their users' privacy can use Watchsend to make their apps better without infringing on their users' privacy. At the end of the day, if a developer wants to spy on their users, there's very little we (or anyone else) can do about it.
A few things that I can think of that they may already be considering:
1. Asking the developer to specify explicitly which screens should be recorded. From the article, it seems like it's opt-out (the developer specifies which screens should not be recorded), rather than opt-in.
2. Showing long recordings at high speed, slowing down/pausing at "interesting" portions
3. Data aggregated across multiple users: for example, a report of places in the app where most users pause the longest
4. Displays of multiple users' interactions with a single screen, overlaid on top of each other
5. Dealing with user offline scenarios where data may need to be locally stored and then uploaded when a connection is available
They must be doing some sort of frame delta on the videos to save bandwidth, I'm assuming.
Very cool idea!
2, 3, 4, and 5 are in the works :)
Something where we collect visual data on live user sessions seems like it may open the door to getting a deeper understanding of what users are actually doing in our apps!
Rapid iteration on mobile is tough enough...as long as this doesn't have too big of a hit on performance, this is about to change the way we develop mobile apps.