My Mouse, My Rules: Privacy Issues of Behavioral User Profiling via Mouse Tracking

TL;DR

This paper highlights privacy concerns related to mouse cursor tracking for user profiling, demonstrating how easily behavioral data can be captured and used to predict demographics, and proposes an adversarial mitigation method.

Contribution

It introduces a simple yet effective technique to predict user demographics from mouse movements and presents an adversarial approach to counteract such profiling methods.

Findings

Mouse tracking can predict demographics with reasonable accuracy

An adversarial method can mitigate user profiling via mouse movements

Data and tools are released for practical use

Abstract

This paper aims to stir debate about a disconcerting privacy issue on web browsing that could easily emerge because of unethical practices and uncontrolled use of technology. We demonstrate how straightforward is to capture behavioral data about the users at scale, by unobtrusively tracking their mouse cursor movements, and predict user's demographics information with reasonable accuracy using five lines of code. Based on our results, we propose an adversarial method to mitigate user profiling techniques that make use of mouse cursor tracking, such as the recurrent neural net we analyze in this paper. We also release our data and a web browser extension that implements our adversarial method, so that others can benefit from this work in practice.