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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
War everybody. How you doing today? In this episode of the show, we're gonna talk about your perception of your privacy as it relates to the tools that you're using. Now, I stumbled across a tweet this morning uh by a young engineer at Facebook. Now, the irony of this entire thread is not lost on me.
Unfortunately, it was on this particular individual, but essentially, they had done a little bit of digging a little bit of thinking and they were calling grammarly the grammar uh as a service um offering predatory and they were calling it a keylogger. Now, this particular engineer isn't necessarily wrong. Um They are obviously in a very big glass house, but let's dissect this a little bit and we'll start by determining exactly what grammarly is.
So you've probably seen the ads here on youtube um online. They're very aggressive in their digital marketing and essentially what grammarly is is in uh machine learning driven model uh around grammar suggestions designed to make your writing better. Now, there's an actual app, there's a website you go to.
But more importantly, there's an extension you can get for Chrome that will help apply this in pretty much any text box. So whether you're writing in Gmail, whether you're writing into Facebook, it will analyze your text and offer suggestions. So it's a fantastic writing tool. Of course, there's a trade off and that's what this thread was about.
This young engineer was calling out the fact that they're logging all of the keystrokes that you're typing, that's partially correct. Now, a keylogger is a particular piece of malware that would be installed without you knowing on your system that is literally logging every single time your finger hits a key.
It's logging that into a file and then uh ex filtrating that out or the attacker can come in and grab it at a later date. So grammarly is not quite a keylogger, it's a service that will intercept keystrokes at your request. So if you use that browser extension, it will do that for the websites you have it enabled for on.
And if you're using their app or their website, then obviously, it's going to look at everything you typing um into the service. And the idea is pretty straightforward. It needs to see what you're writing in order to help improve that writing. So it's definitely not a keylogger. Now, the second uh accusation here was that they are a predatory service.
And as you continue through this Twitter thread, the reason why this person is calling them out as predatory is because the licensing underneath. Now they're not a lawyer thankfully, I am not a lawyer though. I know some lawyers that are absolutely lovely people. Um The idea here is the same in pretty much any terms of service and we've covered terms of service before you can click on the card up top to see that.
Um But terms of service, uh essentially grant the service that you're typing in this case, grammarly license to reuse your content. If you didn't do that, they wouldn't be able to publish it up. Facebook does the same thing, Twitter does the same thing linkedin all of them have this clause in it that says by using the service and by uploading content or creating content on the service, you grant them a license to use it.
Now, depending on how that is worded, that may be an unlimited royalty free license within a certain context or it could just be completely to that um content that you just have carte blanche. Now, now the problem there is what the letter of the terms of service say because on Twitter grammarly replied and said no, no, we don't do.
Um we won't use your uh content to harvest to share. Um We won't use your content to sell ads against, we will don't sell your data. Um Things like that and that's great for them to say. However, if it's not written in the terms of service that I haven't dug through grammarly specifically, this is just a generic case.
If it's not specifically w uh written into the terms of service that you agree with and currently active because we know those terms of services can change, then it doesn't matter what the company says, it matters what the terms state because I can say all the nice things I want if I have legal license to do something else, while I may not have the intention right now of taking that action, I have the legal right to do it if I change my mind.
And when it comes to security, when it comes to privacy, you have to work on the legalities of it. You can't go um with the intentions because the intentions can be broken. If the company hit upon hard times and they had a massive amount of money offered for their data, they'd probably sell it because it's a smart business move and they have a fiduciary responsibility and they have the legal right to do it.
So a lot of challenges there. But the biggest issue that I have with all of this and it's popped up before I wrote years ago, an article when I Os eight came out on iphone and ipad finally allowed you to do custom keyboards. And everyone was like, yes, we can do these custom keyboards.
All these cool keyboards, same problem here by enabling that service, everything you type into that keyboard is going to be sent to the back end, sent to this cloud service in the back end. Now, that might not be a bad thing. But there's a stark difference between logging into an app and providing content and having an app monitoring all the content you're creating in other places on your device because it's one of intention, right?
If I load up youtube and start to type something or linked in and start to type something, I have an intention of posting that content onto that platform. If I'm just surfing on my phone and I have a third party keyboard enabled and it's monitoring that text to, to provide suggestions to show cool animated gifs something else that that keyboard provides.
That's not necessarily my intent. And I think that's the core argument around grammarly here, especially if you've added that extension is that you might not have the intent of that text going into the back end into a third party machine learning server. But as a user, the first thing that should cl uh you to that happening was that you can't use grammarly offline.
It's an online only service because everything you type does go to the back end. Now, for me, that's just my bread and butter. I go in and I dissect these services. I see what's going on. But reading this thread, it really hit home how easy it is to misconstrue the privacy boundaries around these types of services.
Now, for grammarly not saying it's better or it's worse or it's bad or it's good or you shouldn't use it or you should just be aware of the trade off everything that you type into that service directly or through the extension is going to be analyzed because that's how the machine learning model works to make suggestions to improve your writing.
And there's a number of other tools that work like this. So I think there's definitely user experience work to be done around the boundaries. But it's a very interesting scenario. This is not the only example of it. This is not going to be the last example of it. You need to be using tools with intention, you need to uh have hopefully an understanding of the potential impact of those tools and your use of them in various contexts.
And I know that's extremely difficult. That's part of the point of the show. It's part of the point of my efforts working within the technology industry working. Um you know, as a radio columnist working um on this vlog trying to help people understand, but I think designers and builders of technology can take a lot of steps to make things easier.
So people understand the actual impact, not the legal wording or the intentional wording. But hey, here are the boundaries around responsible usage of these tools. What do you think let me know, hit me up online at MARK NC A in the comments down below and as always by email me at Mark N dot ca I hope you are set up for a fantastic day and I'll see you on the next show.
