3 ms·

No joke: "We also collect your typed and handwritten words to improve character recognition and provide you with a personalized user dictionary and text comple

No joke: "We also collect your typed and handwritten words to improve character recognition and provide you with a personalized user dictionary and text completion suggestions." http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/speech-inking-typing-privacy-faq http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/speech-inking-...

quickben 10y ago
Typed character recognition... Unbelievable
- voidz 10y ago
  Makes you wonder if they are really saying profiling in obfuscated terms.
vmateixeira 10y ago
I wonder how does this hold against intellectual property rights... Can they own all the software I may produce on their OS? It sure seems like they can have an easy access to the source code..
- dhimes 10y ago
  I'm sure the TOS has you relieve them of liability and hold them harmless for any use they may make of the software that you wrote.
Already__Taken 10y ago
Doesn't every phone do this to make the swipe style keyboard work and autocorrect?
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Yes, they do. Maybe not sending it to some server though.
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    Maybe not sending it to some server though Those 8 words change are what we're talking about. A keyboard app obviously needs to use your data to improve auto-correct. When it starts sending that data off-device, however, that's a whole different ballgame.
    - bad_user 10y ago
      > A keyboard app obviously needs to use your data to improve auto-correct. No, that's not obvious, in fact that would be the opposite of what a keyboard's auto-correct should do. Because the whole point of having auto-correct is for the keyboard to correct my mistakes, not learn from them or from the mistakes of other people that also don't know how to spell. For this reason for example Swype on iOS has been basically unusable for me, because it makes more mistakes than I do. And no matter the implementation, now every time I choose to override the auto-correct decision for a certain word, I always end up pausing because I fear that from then on, the word will be added so some personal dictionary that I don't want. Basically learning from what the individual types is a disservice to the individual. Also, on iOS custom keywords need explicit permission for accessing the Internet. And on Android I found no mention anywhere that Google's Keyboard sends telemetry to its parent. People just assume that for some reason.
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        The point of auto-correct is to fix it when you fat-finger something, not when your belief of how to spell something is "wrong". There's a reason auto-correct isn't a thing on desktops.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - DanBC 10y ago
        They need the data to know whether you meant eg "from" or "form", which they get from context by looking at hundreds of millions of occurrences.
- cm3 10y ago
  While it's the same problem on phones and you can disable stuff there, it's less of an issue because creation (media, software) happens on a PC and that's a lot more critical. Also, on phones Apple or Google doesn't sneak in an update which re-enables the previously disabled data collection settings. Microsoft went so far to rename NT services to thwart disabling. If Microsoft doesn't fix this soon, they'll either get a lawsuit or lose serious market share. It's a pity because the kernel and surrounding subsystems are getting better with each Windows release. Maybe something like nLite can be used to create a Windows image that doesn't contain the nasty stuff, but then an update would reinstall them The icing on the cake is that even when using Windows Enterprise edition in a Windows Domain, you cannot control what updates are installed as you could before. This is a huge problem because stuff you don't want will be slipped back in. They just lost their mind.
- kuschku 10y ago
  And that’s why you use the AOSP keyboard, not the Google spyware keyboard.

quickben 10y ago

Typed character recognition... Unbelievable

voidz 10y ago
Makes you wonder if they are really saying profiling in obfuscated terms.

vmateixeira 10y ago

I wonder how does this hold against intellectual property rights... Can they own all the software I may produce on their OS? It sure seems like they can have an easy access to the source code..

dhimes 10y ago
I'm sure the TOS has you relieve them of liability and hold them harmless for any use they may make of the software that you wrote.

Already__Taken 10y ago

Doesn't every phone do this to make the swipe style keyboard work and autocorrect?

wingerlang 10y ago
Yes, they do. Maybe not sending it to some server though.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  Maybe not sending it to some server though Those 8 words change are what we're talking about. A keyboard app obviously needs to use your data to improve auto-correct. When it starts sending that data off-device, however, that's a whole different ballgame.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    > A keyboard app obviously needs to use your data to improve auto-correct. No, that's not obvious, in fact that would be the opposite of what a keyboard's auto-correct should do. Because the whole point of having auto-correct is for the keyboard to correct my mistakes, not learn from them or from the mistakes of other people that also don't know how to spell. For this reason for example Swype on iOS has been basically unusable for me, because it makes more mistakes than I do. And no matter the implementation, now every time I choose to override the auto-correct decision for a certain word, I always end up pausing because I fear that from then on, the word will be added so some personal dictionary that I don't want. Basically learning from what the individual types is a disservice to the individual. Also, on iOS custom keywords need explicit permission for accessing the Internet. And on Android I found no mention anywhere that Google's Keyboard sends telemetry to its parent. People just assume that for some reason.
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      The point of auto-correct is to fix it when you fat-finger something, not when your belief of how to spell something is "wrong". There's a reason auto-correct isn't a thing on desktops.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - DanBC 10y ago
      They need the data to know whether you meant eg "from" or "form", which they get from context by looking at hundreds of millions of occurrences.
cm3 10y ago
While it's the same problem on phones and you can disable stuff there, it's less of an issue because creation (media, software) happens on a PC and that's a lot more critical. Also, on phones Apple or Google doesn't sneak in an update which re-enables the previously disabled data collection settings. Microsoft went so far to rename NT services to thwart disabling. If Microsoft doesn't fix this soon, they'll either get a lawsuit or lose serious market share. It's a pity because the kernel and surrounding subsystems are getting better with each Windows release. Maybe something like nLite can be used to create a Windows image that doesn't contain the nasty stuff, but then an update would reinstall them The icing on the cake is that even when using Windows Enterprise edition in a Windows Domain, you cannot control what updates are installed as you could before. This is a huge problem because stuff you don't want will be slipped back in. They just lost their mind.
kuschku 10y ago
And that’s why you use the AOSP keyboard, not the Google spyware keyboard.