Are you an honest person? Your mouse has the answer.
Have you ever wondered if someone could gauge if you are lying or telling the truth simply by a click of a mouse?
Could your personality, Identity and characteristic tendencies be revealed by a simple *click*?
Nowadays, we can only rely on CAPTCHA to help us differentiate between humans and robots, but, could the future change this? Could there be a time where someone can determine your characteristics when you are surfing the internet?
Well, you’re in for a treat because according to Italian researchers Monaro, Gamberini and Sartori who recently published an important study “The detection of faked identity using unexpected questions and mouse dynamics” which states with almost 95 per cent accuracy if a person is lying, with the help of a machine learning algorithm they developed.
The study used 40 subjects in its first run and 20 in its second and concluded that:
For a truthful responder, unexpected questions are supposed to elicit the correct response automatically. By contrast, an identity liar has to reconstruct the non-rehearsed unexpected information and verify it.
The researchers asked a mix of expected and unexpected questions as to target the lying tendencies of the subjects and put pressure on their cognitive load.
They measured a user’s mouse movements and also took into consideration the time of the user in answering the questions. The user may have answered the question correctly, but “unexpected questions will increase a liar’s cognitive load” the researchers declared.
The fact of the matter is, this mouse magic can be considered as both good and bad. Good because it helps us, as humans, uncover our characteristics and natural behavior, bad because various organizations may use this information for their benefit and exploit people.
For example, Facebook in 2013 was reportedly using mouse click data to keep a track on what advertisements we preferred. It is surprising how small bits of mouse clicks can, in the larger picture, reveal who we truly are inside.
Some researchers claimed that mouse clicks could provide a doorway to identify individuals located all around the globe if monitored regularly.
This influenced various organizations like DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). The agency is developing ‘a next generation biometric capability’ based on how users use a mouse and keyboard.
It is an extreme possibility that many other agencies use this information to uncover more private and personal details about our everyday lives, thus, threatening our right to privacy.
However, this could certainly be a step closer to the future, where you could probably derive a person’s entire medical history by a mere mouse click!
This research is fascinating and proves that nothing is impossible for the human world. If we can tell if a person is lying or not by a mouse click, who knows what else we could do in the next decade?.
This has the potential to escalate user and hardware interactions to the next level. You might’ve seen Google remove captchas and place a one click popup boxes to determine whether you’re a robot or not.
It’s because they can understand you with one click! The idea to me is quite terrifying, that someone can gauge who I really am when I’m sitting on my computer and surfing the internet. For our protection, there need to be several security measures against this as to protect our individual rights, otherwise, these big corporations could be forcing us to click more so that they understand our identity.
