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.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.’‘That isn’t enough.  The padlock on the https page gives users a false sense of security.’‘We don’t agree with that.  Where’s your data?’Google wouldn’t have accepted this.  They have pushed full HTTPS hard, and suggesting that it has a negative consequence is unacceptable to them.His experiment has proven the problem.  How else could it have been demonstrated?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.The depressing thing here is that everybody is more interested in calling this guy a jerk than dealing with the issues he has raised.Trust on the internet is broken.  This guy did it with ease.  Imagine what is being done by those who want to scam
millions?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.