3 ms·

Why does a spell checker need to live in the cloud? To harvest user text for marketing analytics of course. Never mind.

• SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  You NEED live updates for spellcheck, or you'll end up with a bunch of red squigglies every time you try and write "bingeable" or "rando".
  • api 8y ago
    So you click "learn." Done. This has been a solved problem since the 1980s. Dictionary updates are also tiny and local storage is gigantic compared to the size of even a massive multi-language dictionary. This is just total nonsense.
    • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      Yeah, sorry, that didn't come through in my text, it IS a ridiculous scenario.
      • api 8y ago
        Ahh! Yeah, your sarcasm went whoosh. :)
• VikingCoder 8y ago
  "Jake Gyllenhaal". The words people are spelling changes all of the time.
• Filligree 8y ago
  To harvest spelling for the use of the spellchecker. Why would you manually build a database of correct spellings when the spellchecker already sees all of them?
• Arnt 8y ago
  "Never attribute to anything else that which you can attribute to malice", right? In this case my first guess would be the database and deployment. That spell checker supports three hundred and umpty-seven languages, right? And I've heard it's based on the words from Google's web index, which I imagine some people might be happy mirroring on their phone but others not. Just guessing.
  • api 8y ago
    Normally I agree with that principle, but in the case of surveillance capitalism I've learned it's often the opposite. Any excuse whatsoever to hoover customer data to feed into marketing analytics is taken, with few exceptions. It's become the primary business model of the Internet and of consumer-oriented computing. Consumer oriented Internet services that do not productize the user are the exception. Things like mobile apps and cloud-based assistance services are guilty unless proven innocent and I only use them if the value proposition is so high that the cost/risk is acceptable. I also try to limit their permissions as much as I can. I tried Grammarly for five minutes. It was cool, but I dropped it when I realized that its business model was obvious. It was uploading every single thing I typed into anything to the mothership. Not only is this invasive as hell but it's also a massive security vulnerability. I don't feel like having my company's bank accounts emptied because someone hacks Grammarly or a disgruntled employee dumps the database and sells anything that looks like an account number on the dark web.
    • RodgerTheGreat 8y ago
      I was aghast the first time I encountered Grammarly; it's an immense security risk, and services like it prey upon the ignorance of end users. I've had conversations with a number of my coworkers who deal with sensitive (PII) data about the plugin. None had realized it was phoning home to do its work, and in every instance so far they've uninstalled it immediately afterward.
• netsharc 8y ago
  Probably because it remains very up-to-date without the difficulty of distributing giant dictionaries as updates (well, obviously new words can be delivered as diffs to existing offline dictionaries). But yeah, if you have access to the world's repository of [something], it's very interesting to see who wants to find out about that thing. Like people editing Sarah Palin's Wikipedia page days before she was announced in 2008. Or Apple forbidding use of Google in their office, because hey, imagine if there's a spike of Google searches for a specific chip or technology from a particular Cupertino IP, and someone is watching. Or if you control people's communication media and can see who's messaging who, with what frequency, and what content (Hello Mark!).
• tzumby 8y ago
  In the context of wallet word seeds you are correct. The dictionary is a 2048 word list that is standardized. If you want to spell check that you can roll something offline. Furthermore, the whole phrase has a checksum step so you'll know if you got one of the words wrong after you're done inputting the words.