Stripe records user movements on its customers' websites

Stripe cofounder here. The question raised ("Is Stripe collecting this data for advertising?") can be readily answered in the negative. This data has never been, would never be, and will never be sold/rented/etc. to advertisers.

Stripe.js collects this data only for fraud prevention -- it helps us detect bots who try to defraud businesses that use Stripe. (CAPTCHAs use similar techniques but result in more UI friction.) Stripe.js is part of the ML stack that helps us stop literally millions of fraudulent payments per day and techniques like this help us block fraud more effectively than almost anything else on the market. Businesses that use Stripe would lose a lot more money if it didn't exist. We see this directly: some businesses don't use Stripe.js and they are often suddenly and unpleasantly surprised when attacked by sophisticated fraud rings.

If you don't want to use Stripe.js, you definitely don't have to (or you can include it only on a minimal checkout page) -- it just depends how much PCI burden and fraud risk you'd like to take on.

We will immediately clarify the ToS language that makes this ambiguous. We'll also put up a clearer page about Stripe.js's fraud prevention.

(Updated to add: further down in this thread, fillskills writes[1]: "As someone who saw this first hand, Stripe’s fraud detection really works. Fraudulent transactions went down from ~2% to under 0.5% on hundreds of thousands of transactions per month. And it very likely saved our business at a very critical phase." This is what we're aiming for (and up against) with Stripe Radar and Stripe.js, and why we work on these technologies.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938141

Stripe customer here. The question raised is, more broadly, "Is Stripe collecting this data in a legal and ethical way?" This too can be readily answered in the negative.

It doesn't matter whether "Stripe.js collects this data only for fraud prevention" or if it works in practice. Under CalOPPA [1], Stripe still has to disclose the collection of the data, and (among other things) allow customers to opt out of collection of this data, and allow customers to inspect the data collected. Stripe's privacy policy refers to opt-out and inspection rights about certain data, but AFAICT not this.

[This is not legal advice]

[1] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xh...

[2] https://stripe.com/privacy#your-rights-and-choices

I am not an attorney. This is not legal advice.

Based on a plain reading of the law, several things about CalOPPA stand out to me. For one, it's not clear to me that the mouse movements in question qualify as "personally identifiable information". Mouse movements are not a first or last name, physical or email address, SSN, telephone number, or any contact method I am familiar with (maybe you know a way?).

Second, it seems to me that opt-out, right to inspect and update, and more are all contingent upon the data being PII within the scope of CalOPPA. Perhaps you can help me with something I've overlooked that would show me where I've erred?

Further, what do you think the correct legal and ethical way for Stripe to use mouse movement data would be? From your comment I can guess that you believe it should be treated as PII. Is that correct?

you have to account for someone using a on screen keyboard to input their credentials.