Unfortunately you'd have to not use a majority of the web services you probably use. If its not Mixpanel, its their own internal solution, an alternative etc.
This is essentially just visualizing the logs most companies are already keeping. To be hyper vigilant:
1) Sign up for a unique email address for each service
2) Don't upload Gravatars
3) Read the privacy policy and TOS of the various services you use to see if you are comfortable with what they are measuring
The truth is, this kind of information is easily overwhelming, but will be useful for customer service and product teams trying to identify where users get lost using a feature, signing up, purchasing a product etc.
Fact: I'm not going to write an app that you can use (perhaps for free) without getting a little something-something in return. Like knowing what features you use in it the most, for example.
Airbnb has the information that is shown in those examples because that user has given them the info (by registering). If someone is using a website it's reasonable to expect that analytics is tracking every move in order to make proper business decisions. If that user has registered for the application, it makes even more sense to attach their actions to their account so you can track customer lifecycle data in order to improve your funnel and decrease churn.
If you don't want a site to gather info about you, then don't use the site. Or use incognito mode I suppose.
I think by showing the individual being tracked and their path it feels creepier than just aggregated data of all user paths but obviously this needs to be know to generate the aggregates and provide data to refine the site or application.
If you are really bothered browse with NoScript and don't allow MixPanel/Google Analytics etc. Check unknown domains to see if they are advertising or analytics services. This won't stop everything but will make it harder.
Note that anything you are doing server side can leave a trace in the logs if nothing else. Also phone apps can easily track this sort of thing too. I've made opting out of anonymous logging a (cheap) paid option in my app (http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists) because I think the data is valuable so I want to allow but discourage opt-out and it is also their to justify the full package price.
Web servers have kept access logs from pretty much the inception of the web. They're not gathering any new information, tools like MixPanel are just organizing and presenting it more effectively.
The issue is cross-site analytics. MixPanel promises not to do it, but if multiple sites all used MixPanel it would be well within their capabilities to gather data on you as you move about their customers' websites.
This data is crucial to determining who is using your product, how they're using, and where users are bailing out. A very simple use case is when you're tracking users that hit your landing page, then hit your pricing page, then leave. If that's too big a percentage of your users, then it might signal that your pricing is off. If it's in response to a certain campaign, then it might be a signal that ad campaign isn't level-setting correctly.
This data tends to be uber-private, and would never be shared outside of the company, but it's also information that could be pieced together from server logs natively anyway (though with significantly more effort). Basically speaking, almost every company collects this data already, this just makes it more actionable.
It's also perhaps worth noting that following an individual user around the site is low value -- what you want to see are aggregates and percentages. Of all the users that make it to a funnel, how many complete? Of those that do complete, what's different about them vs. the others.
For a company the size of AirBNB to track each user individually is prohibitive, but being able to isolate those metrics down into measurable factors is huge.
If your startup wants to do something like this, it's worth noting that you could very easily semi-anonymize the data by attaching tokens to the users instead of tracking by username or email address. You'd still get the same traceability, but perhaps be slightly more able to be comfortable with doing it.
Comments
To me this is in the grey area of privacy. I don't want airbnb (as the example used in the pictures) to gather this kind of information about me.
Unfortunately you'd have to not use a majority of the web services you probably use. If its not Mixpanel, its their own internal solution, an alternative etc.
This is essentially just visualizing the logs most companies are already keeping. To be hyper vigilant:
1) Sign up for a unique email address for each service 2) Don't upload Gravatars 3) Read the privacy policy and TOS of the various services you use to see if you are comfortable with what they are measuring
The truth is, this kind of information is easily overwhelming, but will be useful for customer service and product teams trying to identify where users get lost using a feature, signing up, purchasing a product etc.
Tough.
Fact: I'm not going to write an app that you can use (perhaps for free) without getting a little something-something in return. Like knowing what features you use in it the most, for example.
It's called analytics.
The data is valuable but these companies aren't basing a business off of it, its to improve their product.
Really we have to trust each company individually that they are using our information responsibly cough Google cough
Airbnb has the information that is shown in those examples because that user has given them the info (by registering). If someone is using a website it's reasonable to expect that analytics is tracking every move in order to make proper business decisions. If that user has registered for the application, it makes even more sense to attach their actions to their account so you can track customer lifecycle data in order to improve your funnel and decrease churn.
If you don't want a site to gather info about you, then don't use the site. Or use incognito mode I suppose.
I think by showing the individual being tracked and their path it feels creepier than just aggregated data of all user paths but obviously this needs to be know to generate the aggregates and provide data to refine the site or application.
If you are really bothered browse with NoScript and don't allow MixPanel/Google Analytics etc. Check unknown domains to see if they are advertising or analytics services. This won't stop everything but will make it harder.
Note that anything you are doing server side can leave a trace in the logs if nothing else. Also phone apps can easily track this sort of thing too. I've made opting out of anonymous logging a (cheap) paid option in my app (http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists) because I think the data is valuable so I want to allow but discourage opt-out and it is also their to justify the full package price.
Web servers have kept access logs from pretty much the inception of the web. They're not gathering any new information, tools like MixPanel are just organizing and presenting it more effectively.
The issue is cross-site analytics. MixPanel promises not to do it, but if multiple sites all used MixPanel it would be well within their capabilities to gather data on you as you move about their customers' websites.
This data is crucial to determining who is using your product, how they're using, and where users are bailing out. A very simple use case is when you're tracking users that hit your landing page, then hit your pricing page, then leave. If that's too big a percentage of your users, then it might signal that your pricing is off. If it's in response to a certain campaign, then it might be a signal that ad campaign isn't level-setting correctly.
This data tends to be uber-private, and would never be shared outside of the company, but it's also information that could be pieced together from server logs natively anyway (though with significantly more effort). Basically speaking, almost every company collects this data already, this just makes it more actionable.
It's also perhaps worth noting that following an individual user around the site is low value -- what you want to see are aggregates and percentages. Of all the users that make it to a funnel, how many complete? Of those that do complete, what's different about them vs. the others.
For a company the size of AirBNB to track each user individually is prohibitive, but being able to isolate those metrics down into measurable factors is huge.
If your startup wants to do something like this, it's worth noting that you could very easily semi-anonymize the data by attaching tokens to the users instead of tracking by username or email address. You'd still get the same traceability, but perhaps be slightly more able to be comfortable with doing it.