Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback about this post.
replies(4):
> This is a common practice for anti-fraud detection systems... You will see similar techniques used all over the web (your bank website, Ticketmaster, airlines websites, etc.).
I respectfully disagree.
My bank tracks my movement on their own website. They don't track movement on other businesses' websites.
I believe many developers integrate with Stripe expecting that their JS library executes and shares data only on the pages where Stripe UI elements appear on the page. The fact that JS library runs on every page and sends data back to Stripe, even before the app calls the API, is unexpected. I believe that Stripe should, at the very least, make this more obvious to integrators and, ideally, give site owners the ability to limit what data Stripe collects.
Given your background I'd imagine you'd be aware of this.
I view that as a different situation. If a bank/airline/ticketer outsources fraud to a third party, there's presumably an informed exchange of "we'll let you run JS on every page on our website and suck up whatever information you want if you help us detect fraud."
In the case of Stripe, I don't believe they're clear with client applications that they're collecting information from every page of an app. I think most developers integrate with Stripe so they can accept payment on one or two pages and probably don't expect Stripe to be collecting the level of data they're reporting back to Stripe servers.
Heck, I have a friend who's working on a non-finance web app with <20k MRR, and even at that size he's starting to encounter fraud problems that require tooling to mitigate.
If your app stores any data that may be sellable on the dark web, you are a target.
Hypothetically: I tell a dev to drop a piece of JS on every page that seems related to payments. That dev probably isn’t doing their job super well if they don’t ask me why or wonder why and find out.
I think you imagine HN readers to be dumb. Nothing here is surprising.
I know it’s covid era and we felt good as a community wagging our fingers at Zoom’s naughty FB tracking inclusion. Legitimate concerns there given the advertising business model, and no good reason for zoom to be doing it. This is fundamentally different: the data is for a good purpose with a narrow scope to a good company with a user-positive value creation model.
I believe your princess is in another castle.