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Facebook may collect detailed user behaviour data, including onscreen cursor tracking

Facebook may collect detailed user behaviour data, including onscreen cursor tracking

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 31 October 2013 12:57 IST

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Facebook already encourages users to share more personal information and pictures, and now, it appears that social networking service also wants to analyse how users browse the website, minutely.

Facebook says it may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal.

According to Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin, the data could comprise of user behaviour patterns such as 'how long a user's cursor hovers over a certain part of its website', or 'whether a user's newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone'.

He added that this information could be added to a data analytics warehouse accessible throughout Facebook for a number of purposes ranging from product development to better targeting of advertising.

The knowledge of whether a certain user is more likely to hover the mouse curser over an ad could result in improved targeting of ads and even new ad types. It could also allow the company to see which features are used by certain users when they're browsing their Facebook feed.

In an interview, Rudin elaborated that the present experimental data collection would be part of Facebook's behavioural dataset which also includes information on users' friends or Facebook likes and are captured live.

He added that the ongoing tests were a 'part of a broader technology testing program', and that Facebook would determine within a few months if it makes sense to integrate the new data. So, it's not certain if features linked to it would be extended to end users, at this point in time.

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