How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
I’d like to defend this guy.  What he is doing is testing the trust mechanism.<p>If he went to Google and said ‘I think the trust mechanism is broken’ Google would say: ‘We know, that’s why we are pushing to move everyone to https.’<p>‘That isn’t enough.  The padlock on the https page gives users a false sense of security.’<p>‘We don’t agree with that.  Where’s your data?’<p>Google wouldn’t have accepted this.  They have pushed full HTTPS hard, and suggesting that it has a negative consequence is unacceptable to them.<p>His experiment has proven the problem.  How else could it have been demonstrated?<p>Ideally this would have been a large scale study done by academics. But this guy doesn’t have those resources. Nobody is going to fund this research.<p>The depressing thing here is that everybody is more interested in calling this guy a jerk than dealing with the issues he has raised.<p>Trust on the internet is broken.  This guy did it with ease.  Imagine what is being done by those who want to scam
millions?<p>But yeh, call him a jerk and then you can bury your unease beneath a big pile of outrage.  It’s fine.  Fine.  He’s a jerk.