As if it didn’t know enough about you already, Facebook now wants to be able to track your mouse cursor as you interact with the site, and has apparently been researching the feasibility and profitability of doing so. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, the social media giant is looking for ways to better track how users interact with content and ads on Facebook. Using the data it gets from this project, it would then be able to adapt its advertising methods accordingly to generate ever-more numbers of clicks.

Facebook already employs a number of methods, such as tracking user’s friendships and ‘likes’, and would combine its mouse-tracking data with this to generate even more detail about each particular Facebook user. The WSJ says that the research is being led by Facebook’s analytics chief Ken Rudin, who previously worked as the vice president of analytics and platform technologies at Zynga. In addition, the company is using screen behavior technology similar to that used by companies like Shutterstock, the stock images marketplace, which monitors the cursor and screen behavior of every site visitor. In the case of Shutterstock, the massive amounts of data generated by its mouse-tracking operations are stored and analyzed with Hadoop, the open-source software that’s used to “store large amounts of data on clusters of inexpensive machines,” according to the WSJ.

Given the scale of this operation is almost unprecedented when you consider Facebook has almost 1.2 billion users, it’s likely that it will also resort to using Hadoop. The software is able to prioritize information and bring this to the forefront whenever an employee access it, thus preventing servers from becoming “data junkyards”. The WSJ says that if an Hadoop system is implemented, it could well be used across all of Facebook’s departments, with ad targeting, product development and various other business processes likely to benefit from the data it gathers.

Aside from the technical aspects of what would be a truly mind-boggling data-gathering operation, even for a company like Facebook, there will also be privacy concerns – no doubt users will want to know how this affects their privacy on the site. Unfortunately, the reality is that anyone who uses Facebook has very little privacy left to lose anyway. Even so, if the system really is implemented Facebook will undoubtedly gain further insights into your personality, knowing exactly how long you spend hovering over pictures of that secret crush of yours for instance, and perhaps even using said images to make personalized ads (similar to what Google is doing) that you just won’t be able to resist clicking.