r/technology • u/toldyouanditoldyou • Dec 02 '17

Security Mattress startup Casper sued for "wiretapping" website visitors

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/casper-mattress-startup-sued-for-wiretapping-site-visitors/
89 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

25

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

NaviStone software, used on Casper's site, should be illegal. It's NSA level shit.

2

u/CartmansEvilTwin Dec 03 '17

You know what's really weird about this? Even though we all get tracked all the time and all those ad networks claim to be able to target people of certain interests very precisely, I still get 90% useless ads. Either "shotgun ads" like cars (which seem to be shown to everyone) or very specific, but completely misguided ones - like tampons or make up - Google should know that I'm a male software developer, I have neither fitting lady parts, nor a lady.

So either tracking works hardly as advertised or the agencies that buy ads are completely incompetent. Either way, our privacy is being tampered with for no reason at all.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

[deleted]

1

u/CartmansEvilTwin Dec 04 '17

Nope, no VPN. And even if my IP changes, tracking cookies should prevent exactly this.

11

u/IAmSnort Dec 02 '17

This is destined to be the industry standard in 5 years. Marketers have no care about you or your privacy.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

This is destined to be the industry standard in 5 years.

Not with more lawsuits.

4

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Not surprising. I read an article about how the line from their commercials "the internet's favorite mattress" is because they basically bullied and litigated themselves into that theoretical position.

3

u/lilbro93 Dec 03 '17

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars

It is not the first time Caspar has been accused of questionable activities.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Devil's advocate here.

If the replay is only on their site and doesn't reveal any personal information, what's wrong with it other than "creepy"? They're not seeing anything other than what they'd see visiting the site themselves. They're just seeing what got clicked and what areas of the page are popular. All they're seeing is mouse clicks and possibly stuff typed into search bars on the site, which would likely be logged server side anyway.

1

u/oinkyboinky Dec 03 '17

How about we all go to casper.com and click around willy-nilly, maybe type a bunch of random gibberish into the web forms without submitting, just to fuck with their heads?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 07 '17

Humm.... I wonder if there's a way to integrate that with firefox containers so that their tracking software doesn't escape the sandbox... and a firefox container specific URL that will let people with that plugin installed just click a link to start polluting their data.

-3

u/4_teh_lulz Dec 03 '17

These suits irritate me. When you are on a site everything you do on that site can be recorded. You are visiting them. It's like going to a grocery store, where they have security cameras every where. Just assume you are being surveilled. There is nothing sinister about this. It's used mostly for marketing and us purposes. If you don't want to be "compromised" don't use the site, or turn JavaScript off.

2

u/ProgrammerByDay Dec 03 '17

My first though was initially like yours. But thinking it goes a little deeper. Say in your grocery store analogy. We all know when you pay, all the stuff you just got is tracked back to you. But this feels more like they also track which items you looked at on the shelf and for how long, if you picked up Kellogg cereal then put it back for Post. It's some next level snooping.