[HN Gopher] Show HN: Roundtable - Survey fraud and bot detection...
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       Show HN: Roundtable - Survey fraud and bot detection API
        
       Hi HN, we're Mayank and Matt of Roundtable
       (https://www.roundtable.ai). We launched our Survey Simulator as
       part of YC S23 (see Launch HN:
       https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865625), and ultimately
       decided to pivot because we couldn't convince users to trust our
       results and our value proposition wasn't clear.  We conducted tons
       of user discovery interviews, and a lot of big players talked about
       the pain of manual QC and bot detection. We launched a survey fraud
       and bot detection API (Alias; docs.roundtable.ai) that determines
       whether a bot is answering your survey or not. Our API embeds
       Javascript into survey programs (Forsta, Qualtrics, jsPsych, etc.)
       to track user behavior and make a judgment on whether the data is
       from a high-quality participant.  You can use our demo, and try to
       break it, here: https://www.roundtable.ai/hn-demo. See if you can
       generate LLM-based text without any flags going off! Feedback
       welcome!
        
       Author : timshell
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2024-01-19 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
       | camdoody wrote:
       | Mayank and Matt at Roundtable are two of the most special people
       | I've met. No telling what RT looks like in 3 years.
        
         | colesantiago wrote:
         | I'm assuming you invested in roundtable right?
        
       | warkdarrior wrote:
       | What are the privacy guarantees you give to users subjected to
       | your tracking? I don't see anything in your terms, and the
       | javascript tracker seems to collect everything the user does on
       | the page without any privacy-preserving techniques applied.
        
         | timshell wrote:
         | We only track typing behavior in pre-specified text boxes. We
         | are thinking of having version 2 track more data, but we need
         | to determine the privacy implications of that
        
       | LaundroMat wrote:
       | From the docs it appears this is only for open-ended survey
       | questions.
       | 
       | Do any tools exist to detect suspicious behaviour for e.g.
       | multiple choice surveys? I'm thinking of tab switching to Google
       | for an answer for instance.
        
         | timshell wrote:
         | Correct, it's only for open-ended survey questions! We are
         | building functionality for multiple choice surveys, but it
         | seems a bit harder to build
        
       | BottingRocks wrote:
       | Here is some of the feedback. In terms of bot protection you
       | would get a 1/10. Perhaps, a 2/10 on a good day.
       | 
       | First, your payload is being sent using base64 encoded using the
       | default alphabet. You only need a simple atob() to decrypt your
       | payload.
       | 
       | Second of all, your bot detection script is very readable making
       | the job of the attacker relatively easy to reverse.
       | 
       | Third, but not least, you do not have enough signals/fingerprints
       | which means that your false positives are going to sky-rocket.
       | 
       | Bots are not dumb, they are programmed by real humans, your site
       | is extremely easy to reverse. You need to add more obfuscation,
       | more signals, better client-side protection in order to quality
       | for real "bot detection".
       | 
       | Source: I reverse antibots for fun and profit, is literally all
       | I've been doing for the past 2 years straight.
        
         | timshell wrote:
         | Thank you for this feedback! We'd love to contract you in the
         | future to try and break our system
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-19 23:01 UTC)