Services & Privacy Perceptions

14 minute read | Last updated 12-Mar-2019 |  Privacy

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Bad Robot Transcript

What and everybody how you doing today in this episode of the show? We’re going to talk about your perception of your privacy as it relates to the tools that you’re using and I stumble across a tweet this morning. I buy 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 as a service offering predatory and they were calling it a keylogger. Now this particular necessarily wrong. 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 so you probably seen the ads pure on YouTube online.

They’re very aggressive in the digital marketing in essential grammarly is is in machine learning driven model around Summer suggestions designed to make your writing better. Now there is 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 the Fantastic writing tool of course, there is a trade-off and that’s what this thread was about that young engineer was calling out the fact that they’re logging all 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 hit saki it’s logging that into a file and then I excel training that out or the attacker can come in and grab it at a later date to Grammy’s 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 website to have it enabled for on and if you’re using there. Copper their website then obviously it’s going to look at everything you’re typing. I’m into the service me ideas pretty straightforward.

It needs to see what you’re writing in order to help improve that writing. So it’s definitely not a keylogger know the second accusation here was that they are a predatory service and is you continue through this Twitter thread, the reason why I 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 and 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 but terms of service at essentially Grant the service that you’re typing in his case grammarly license to reuse your content.

If you didn’t do that, they would be able to publish it app 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.

Math, depending on how that is worded that may be an unlimited royalty-free license within a certain context or could just be completely to that content to get it have carte Blanc. Now another problem. There is what the letter of the terms of service say because on Twitter Graham really replied to the neural we don’t do we won’t use your content to harvest is to share we won’t use your content to sell ads against we won’t sell your data on things.

Like that’s great for them to say however, if it’s not written in the terms of service and I haven’t dug through grammarly specifically this is just in case if it’s not specifically 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 out while I may not have the intention right now. I’m taking that action. I have the legal right to do it if I change my mind and What’s the security when it comes to privacy you have to work on the legalities of it? You can’t go I’m with the intentions because the intentions can be broken if the company had upon hard times and they had a massive amount of money offered for their data.

They probably sell it because it’s a smart business move and 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 stuff before I wrote a years ago an article when iOS 8 came out on iPhone and iPad finally allowed to do custom keyboards never was the same problem here by enabling that service everything you type into that keyboard is going to be sent to the back and sent to this cloud service in the back at know that might not be a bad thing.

But there’s a stark difference between logging into a nap and providing content and having an app monitoring all the content York reading and other places on your device because one of intention right if I load up YouTube and start to type something or LinkedIn. How 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 its monitoring that texted to provide suggestions to show cool animated gifs something else of 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 service.

What is the use of the first thing that should have clued you to that happening was it 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 the services.

I see what’s going on, but reading this thread I really hit home how easy it is to misconstrue the Privacy boundaries around these types of services that for grammarly. I’m not saying it’s better or it’s worse or batter. It’s good or you shouldn’t use it or you should We’re of the trade-off everything that you type in 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 that.

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 have hopefully an understanding of the potential impact of those tools and your use of them in various context.

I know that’s extremely difficult as part of the point of the Shelf part of the point of my efforts working within the technology industry working on the radio calling us working on this blog 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 intention of wyrding, but hey, who are the boundaries around responsible usage of these tools? Let me know hit me up online at Mark MCA in the comments down below and is always by email me at Mark and.

See. I hope you are set up for a fantastic day and I’ll see you on the next show. What and everybody how you doing today in this episode of the show? We’re going to talk about your perception of your privacy as it relates to the tools that you’re using and I stumble across a tweet this morning.

I buy 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 as a service offering predatory and they were calling it a keylogger.

Now this particular necessarily wrong. 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 so you probably seen the ads pure on YouTube online. They’re very aggressive in the digital marketing in essential grammarly is is in machine learning driven model around Summer suggestions designed to make your writing better.

Now there is 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 the Fantastic writing tool of course, there is a trade-off and that’s what this thread was about that young engineer was calling out the fact that they’re logging all 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 hit saki it’s logging that into a file and then I excel training that out or the attacker can come in and grab it at a later date to Grammy’s 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 website to have it enabled for on and if you’re using there. Copper their website then obviously it’s going to look at everything you’re typing. I’m into the service me ideas pretty straightforward.

It needs to see what you’re writing in order to help improve that writing. So it’s definitely not a keylogger know the second accusation here was that they are a predatory service and is you continue through this Twitter thread, the reason why I 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 and 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 but terms of service at essentially Grant the service that you’re typing in his case grammarly license to reuse your content.

If you didn’t do that, they would be able to publish it app 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.

Math, depending on how that is worded that may be an unlimited royalty-free license within a certain context or could just be completely to that content to get it have carte Blanc. Now another problem. There is what the letter of the terms of service say because on Twitter Graham really replied to the neural we don’t do we won’t use your content to harvest is to share we won’t use your content to sell ads against we won’t sell your data on things.

Like that’s great for them to say however, if it’s not written in the terms of service and I haven’t dug through grammarly specifically this is just in case if it’s not specifically 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 out while I may not have the intention right now. I’m taking that action. I have the legal right to do it if I change my mind and What’s the security when it comes to privacy you have to work on the legalities of it? You can’t go I’m with the intentions because the intentions can be broken if the company had upon hard times and they had a massive amount of money offered for their data.

They probably sell it because it’s a smart business move and 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 stuff before I wrote a years ago an article when iOS 8 came out on iPhone and iPad finally allowed to do custom keyboards never was the same problem here by enabling that service everything you type into that keyboard is going to be sent to the back and sent to this cloud service in the back at know that might not be a bad thing.

But there’s a stark difference between logging into a nap and providing content and having an app monitoring all the content York reading and other places on your device because one of intention right if I load up YouTube and start to type something or LinkedIn. How 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 its monitoring that texted to provide suggestions to show cool animated gifs something else of 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 service.

What is the use of the first thing that should have clued you to that happening was it 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 the services.

I see what’s going on, but reading this thread I really hit home how easy it is to misconstrue the Privacy boundaries around these types of services that for grammarly. I’m not saying it’s better or it’s worse or batter. It’s good or you shouldn’t use it or you should We’re of the trade-off everything that you type in 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 that.

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 have hopefully an understanding of the potential impact of those tools and your use of them in various context.

I know that’s extremely difficult as part of the point of the Shelf part of the point of my efforts working within the technology industry working on the radio calling us working on this blog 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 intention of wyrding, but hey, who are the boundaries around responsible usage of these tools? Let me know hit me up online at Mark MCA in the comments down below and is always by email me at Mark and.

See. I hope you are set up for a fantastic day and I’ll see you on the next show.