Scientists from the University of Luxembourg and their international partners conducted two studies that showed how mouse movements can be used to gain additional data on user behavior. They note that mouse movements can also reveal sensitive information. Scientists have already proposed measures to prevent such tracking.

Professor Luis Leyva notes that the study shows how easy it is to collect behavioral data about users at any scale by tracking mouse movements in an unobtrusive manner https://creabl.com/service/session-recording such tracking has been available on many sites for many years, but advanced knowledge was required to analyze cursor movements in Computer Science and Machine Learning. To date, there are already many libraries and frameworks that allow anyone with minimal programming knowledge to create quite complex classifiers, the scientist emphasizes. Leyva stresses that this raises new privacy concerns.

The team analyzed three typical scenarios in which users had to make choices in search engines: when they notice the ad, when they leave the page, and when they don't like the result presented by the search. The experiment showed that if users pay attention to ads, the search engine will receive information about this from the initial movements of their mouse. In the case of abandoning the page, everything works the other way around: the last mouse movements without clicks tell whether the user decided to leave it, whether he is satisfied with the search results or not. When the user did not like the result of the search engine, it seemed that his behavior was given by the middle part of the mouse movement trajectory.