www.clarity.ms: How Microsoft Clarity Tracks Your Online Behavior

Microsoft Clarity’s tracker, www.clarity.ms, is a behavioral analytics tool that monitors your interactions on websites. It collects extensive data to analyze user behavior, but this comes at a significant cost to your privacy. Here’s what you need to know about what it does, what it collects, and how to protect yourself.

What Is www.clarity.ms?

Clarity is a tool offered by Microsoft to website owners, designed to track user interactions like clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. It generates heatmaps and session recordings, but its data collection is highly invasive. As Privacy Auditors, we believe you should be aware of how tools like Clarity undermine your anonymity online.

Data It Collects

When you visit a site using Clarity, it gathers:

• IP Address: Reveals your location and can be linked to your identity.
• Mouse Movements: Tracks X/Y coordinates and timestamps of your cursor.
• Clicks: Logs where and when you click, including specific elements.
• Scroll Depth: Measures how far you scroll, in pixels or percentage.
• Session ID: Ties all your actions in a session to a unique identifier.
• User ID: Tracks you as an individual across sessions if identified.
• Browser Type: Identifies your browser, like ‘Edge 123.0’.
• Device Type: Detects if you’re on mobile or desktop, like ‘iPhone 14’.
• Page URL: Captures the full URL, including query parameters.
• Referrer URL: Tracks where you came from, such as an ad.
• Timestamps: Logs every action with millisecond precision.
• Cookie IDs: Uses cookies like ‘_clck’ to track you across visits.

This level of tracking creates a detailed profile of your behavior.

Who Gets Your Data?

Clarity shares your data with:

• Website Owner: The site using Clarity receives detailed analytics about your behavior.
• Microsoft Internal System: Uses data for product analysis per privacy policy.
• Third-Party Advertising Network: Microsoft may use data for targeted ads.
• Government Entity: Per Microsoft’s 2024 transparency report, over 165,000 requests with 70% U.S. compliance for IP data.

How to Protect Yourself

Privacy Auditors are committed to helping you reclaim your privacy. Here’s how to block Clarity’s tracking:

• Enable Tracker Blockers: Use Privacy Auditor’s service to block scripts from this domain.
• Use a VPN: Hide your IP with a service like Mullvad.
• Browse with Privacy-Focused Browsers: Use Firefox with strict tracking protection or Tor.
• Disable JavaScript: Stop Clarity scripts via browser settings, though sites may break.
• Clear Cookies: Delete cookies like ‘_clck’ to disrupt tracking.

Combine these methods for maximum protection against invasive trackers.

Sources

• Microsoft Privacy Policy: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
• Clarity Documentation: https://clarity.microsoft.com/

This is a legal disclaimer. All information is provided for educational purposes only.