In two recently published research papers, computer scientists from the University of Luxembourg and international partners show how mouse movements c

Mouse movements reveal your behaviour

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2021-06-24 10:30:07

In two recently published research papers, computer scientists from the University of Luxembourg and international partners show how mouse movements can be used to gain additional knowledge about the user behaviour. While this has many interesting applications, mouse movements can also reveal sensitive information about the users such as their age or gender. Scientists want to raise awareness about these potential privacy issues and have proposed measures to mitigate them.

Prof. Luis Leiva from the University of Luxembourg and corresponding author of the two papers explains in more details the key findings.

“We have demonstrated how straightforward it is to capture behavioural 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. For years, recording mouse movements on websites has been easy, however to analyse them one would need advanced expertise in computer science and machine learning. Today, there are many libraries and frameworks that allows anyone with a minimum of programming knowledge to create rather sophisticated classifiers. This raises new privacy issues and users do not have an easy opt -out mechanism.”

Based on their results, the team developed a method to prevent mouse tracking by distorting the mouse coordinates in real-time. “It is inspired by recent research in adversarial machine learning, and has been implemented as a web browser extension, so that anyone can benefit from this work in practice,” explains Leiva. The web browser extension called MouseFaker is available on Github.