16 votes

If you are using Selenium to scrape sites by any chance, telemetry may have been collected from you without consent

Posted by pyeri
Tags: privacy, software, web, tracking, telemetry, selenium, author.boni garcia, source.github
https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/13173

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Title
[rust] Tracking Selenium Manager usage through Plausible (#11211) by bonigarcia · Pull Request #13173 · SeleniumHQ/selenium
Authors
SeleniumHQ
Published
Dec 13 2023
Word count
148 words

3 comments

  1. vord
    Link
    Hypothetical Person A: "Hm, we need to know who is using what features" Hypothetical Person B: "Lets do some polls from our most-enaged users, have some freeform feedback sections." Hypothetical...

    Hypothetical Person A: "Hm, we need to know who is using what features"
    Hypothetical Person B: "Lets do some polls from our most-enaged users, have some freeform feedback sections."
    Hypothetical Person A: "Nah, let's inject a ton of telemetry to our product"

    This is what's wrong with the world.

    I appreciate the comment:

    In a world where data is king, and is generally taken without consent, be the bigger firm and specifically REQUEST it BEFORE taking it

    If your intents are not nefarious, having them being proper opt-in (single ask, no re-prompt, no gated features) will help me believe that.

    10 votes
  2. [2]
    xk3
    Link
    I don't get how they couldn't just use server-side request statistics to track browser driver downloads because it is already making a request to a server they control, I think?

    I don't get how they couldn't just use server-side request statistics to track browser driver downloads because it is already making a request to a server they control, I think?

    7 votes
    1. vord
      Link Parent
      Because parsing server logs is more complicated than embedding tracking API calls to a third party /s

      Because parsing server logs is more complicated than embedding tracking API calls to a third party /s

      6 votes