Inspectlet.com?
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Like most Internet users, I’m prepared to put up with a degree of non-intrusive advertising so that companies like WordPress, Google, Facebook and the like can make money and provide me with services for free. That’s the deal.
Like most Internet users, I’ve become used to having my private data – the details I submit to sites and what I do online; my clicks and referrals, and so on – collected and sold so that these businesses can make even more money and tell me that I ‘benefit’ from ‘targeted advertising’.
I don’t benefit from targeted advertising, in fact – of course I don’t – but this is the way of the Internet and, as I say, I’m become used to it. My data is money for these companies. To some extent, I can live with that.
But I do have a limit – and I strongly suspect that that limit is something called ‘Inspectlet.com’. This is an analytics ‘service’ currently ‘trusted’ by WordPress.com, which – as far as I can tell – records and analyses what I do online.
This includes – I’m serious – screen capture. Inspectlet.com actually appears – based on its own descriptions and third-party reviews – to take images of my screen and relay these to who-knows-where.
Are we all just okay with this? Have I finally become too old for the Internet? Or have I just crucially misunderstood what Inspectlet.com does, and why WordPress – a service I’ve long trusted to be less than usually evil – has got into bed with them?
Sure, yes, I understand that Analytics Are Good™. I’ll toe that line if the Internet demands it. But come on: screen capture is not okay. That’s going too far. Doesn’t anyone else use the Internet for banking? Or their computer for personal correspondence? Am I the only one that can’t reconcile these things with actual, visual recording of my screen by an unaccountable third-party company?
And of course the only way out is by setting an opt-out cookie, rather than a much fairer opt-in. Because people might not choose to opt in, and then Inspectlet.com don’t make as much money. But if you’re using an opt-out system instead of opt-in, then in all likelihood it probably means you know you’re doing the wrong thing?
But like I said: I may have completely misunderstood. So can WordPress please reassure me that Inspectlet.com does not do what it appears to be saying it does? If it does, then it’s a deal-breaker for me. I realise that there may be thousands of similar companies who’ve managed to sneak their surveillance past my limited understanding and all I’m doing here is showing off my naivety – but I can’t consciously accept something like this.
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From a link on WordPress to Inspectlet.com’s opt-out page. That page reads:
“Opting out of Inspectlet will disable screen capture for your browser by any websites using Inspectlet.
How does it work?
We will put a cookie on your site that tells Inspectlet not to record screen captures.”
Searching on Inspectlet.com, I find countless breathless reviews of its effectiveness as an analytics service, as it enables site admins to see exactly what their visitors are doing (one of its services purports to be able to see where they’re actually looking, you know, with their eyes…) – yet, oddly, I can’t find a single search result anywhere raising issues of privacy and surveillance.
Which is why I’m quite prepared to accept that I’ve misunderstood – but if so, I’m going to need it explained to me…!
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Well, the actual location of the links appears to be very important – though what I’m asking doesn’t really depend on that. Still, I found it here:
https://en.wordpress.com/settings/account/
Go to the bottom of the page to the Privacy section. It says:
“Privacy
We use some third party tools to collect data about how users interact with our site. You can find more information about how we use these tools in our privacy policy. If you’d prefer that we not track your interactions you may opt out by using the following links:
Inspectlet.com opt-out | Kissmetrics.com opt-out”
The Inspectlet.com link goes to https://www.inspectlet.com/optout, where you’ll find the text I quoted above. Does that help?
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