zlacker

> first or last name, physical or email address, SSN, telephone number, or any contact method I am familiar with (maybe you know a way?)

What about a face? Fingerprints? Voice? Aren't those identifiable information even though it didn't make your (common sensical) short list? Mouse movements are on the same order of specificity.

Edit: Also not giving legal advice.

Edit2: Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22939145

>>techbi+(OP)
I have yet to hear of legally binding definition of PII that involves mouse movements.

>>techbi+(OP)
It's less my short list and more the one in the text of the law being cited. Other things, such as finger-, voice-, and face-prints were probably not contemplated by lawmakers in 2003 and thus go unmentioned. They may fall under the "maintains in personally identifiable form in combination with an identifier" clause, though.

Of course, that also provides an easy way to comply. Don't store mouse movements in a way that ties them to PII under CalOPPA, and you don't meet any criteria.

>>swsieb+l
Not a lawyer, but not that surprised that the laws you refer to are growing technical loopholes. Here are a couple things that mouse movements can identify in case no one knows what I'm talking about:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221325920_User_re-a...

https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/your-computer-may-know-...

>>Kalium+A
Makes sense, but I don't trust it to never be tied to PII.

>>techbi+s1
Thank you for bringing hard research to this discussion!

I find it interesting that the one that contemplates authentication requires supervised machine learning and goes on to explicitly state that "analyzing mouse movements alone is not sufficient for a stand-alone user re-authentication system". Taken together, this suggests that a sizable corpus of mouse movement data known to be associated with one user may qualify as PII under some definitions.

Again, thank you for sharing this timely information.

>>techbi+H1
That's definitely a question of implementation, policy, compliance, and liability. You are absolutely correct.

The law in question also requires data to be maintained in personally identifiable form. I am uncertain if a small number of mouse movements is likely to reach this. I do not see how, but that's not a reason why it cannot be so.

>>Kalium+c2
This is how we can say mouse movements can lead to privacy violation: mouse movements as such doesn't contain PII like name, zipcode or gender. But when mouse movements are run through the machine learning algorithm, it can NOT only help you to identify the person (mouse dynamics are behavioral factors and you can map across different sites. By mapping across different sites, you will learn basically the same person is surfing these three sites and valuable information for advertising world, as an example) but you can analyze the mouse movements to identify your health issues. Now you take this information and link to other publicly available databases to identify the person!! So, overall, if stripe doesn't sell this data to analyze other patterns like id or health issues, its fine...but guaranteeing it is hard.

So at Unknot.id, we learn similar patterns to detect fraud but using smartphones. But we make sure, only needed results (that is fraud or not) can be achieved and not his health or other privacy related.