Stripe records user movements on its customers' websites

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback about this post.

This is a common practice for anti-fraud detection systems. The whole article is sensationalistic. You will see similar techniques used all over the web (your bank website, Ticketmaster, airlines websites, etc.).

Thanks for reading!

> 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.

You may not be aware of how many banks/airlines/ticket websites have outsourced their fraud fighting to solutions like Shape Security, or Sift (Science). Web-wide tracking via cookies is a reasonable and widespread technique for fighting fraud.

Given your background I'd imagine you'd be aware of this.

> You may not be aware of how many banks/airlines/ticket websites have outsourced their fraud fighting to solutions like Shape Security, or Sift (Science). Web-wide tracking via cookies is a reasonable and widespread technique for fighting fraud.

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.

This “level of data” doesn’t strike me as alarming. It’s views and mouse locations. Really no different than any simple analytics solution.

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.