Zuckerberg seems to believe that his company hasn’t been hitting the headlines enough for invading consumers’ privacy. Perhaps, with all this Snowden and Prism stuff, Facebook’s invasions of privacy were forgotten, other than the relevant department of the EU.



Media reports reveal that social network is currently testing software to monitor users’ cursor movements. The company admitted it might start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content. In other words, it will collect information about how long your cursor hovers over a certain part of its site, or whether your newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of your mobile gadget.

Collected data is supposed to be stored in a data analytics warehouse which will make sure that you get targeted ads based on what you normally hover your cursor over. At the moment, the company is running tests as a part of a broader technology testing program, but the developers should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new feature into the business.

Facebook isn’t the first website to do such a thing. For instance, Shutterstock records almost everything its users do on the website. The service uses the open-source Hadoop distributed file system in order to analyze information such as where visitors place their cursors and how long they hover over an image before buying it. Facebook is a big fan of Hadoop as well, as it also uses its modified version to manage its information.

The industry observers wonder whether Facebook can manage to get away with its cunning plan, especially in the European Union where some governments are particularly sensitive about the matter of information storage and personal privacy.