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Wait but that's literally what the auto complete feature does. Most users understand the value of the feature (they use it!) but there's a good reason to spell

Wait but that's literally what the auto complete feature does. Most users understand the value of the feature (they use it!) but there's a good reason to spell out the cost too. I agree with the criticism that they should draw a clearer line between the cost and the benefit but there's nothing to be gained by softening the language used to describe the cost.

jammygit 7y ago
Years ago I used to assume autocompletions were performed on device, not sent to a server
chucksmash 7y ago
I'd naively consider a keylogger to be software that captures your keypresses universally. I use Firefox and have search suggestions disabled there so I am somewhat sympathetic to their point. That said, calling server-side autocomplete on a field you explicitly are typing in strikes me as about as sensible and forthright as calling an Amazon text field that takes my credit card number a card skimmer.
- aflag 7y ago
  There are keyloggers targeted to specific fields too. It depends on what vulnerability is being exploited to install a keylogger. I think the description of autocomplete as a keylogger is a good fit from the security perspective.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    No, as a keylogger is the term for a malware to capture ALL your keystrokes in secret (to usually later fish out the interesting ones like passwords). It is misleading, to mix it up with a software, that captures your textinput from a textfield, even though it is not communicated clearly to the average user that his text goes to a server.
- davvolun 7y ago
  > calling server-side autocomplete on a field you explicitly are typing in strikes me as about as sensible and forthright as calling an Amazon text field that takes my credit card number a card skimmer Exactly, and waters down the impact of the termminology. If "card skimmer" is anything that can read a credit card, than the term is meaningless for security. If "keylogger" is anything connected to the web that responds to a keypress... GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here.
  - gregknicholson 7y ago
    > GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here. As with a lot of the FSF's messaging, I think the substance of the message may be correct, but the way they convey it just isn't effective. If this is for a general audience(!), no-one was ever convinced by the 48th item in a list who wasn't already convinced by the 47th. You don't persuade people just by being right, and certainly not by banging on about the very many subtly-different ways in which you're right. Pick few strong examples and prosecute those decisively. If this is a resource for campaigners, set out the audience and intent before you start. Preface it with something like “Here are various ways that certain aspects of Google's software can be seen as indistinguishable from malware. They may be useful counterarguments if someone suggests Google's software is trustworthy.”
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      There's a lot to appreciate about Stallman, but as an ideologue, he's never going to prioritize a gentle & incremental articulation of his ideas. We could call it a failure to empathize, but you see ideologues all over undermining their communication by making it as distilled & radical as possible. But that's not what tends to convince other humans they're wrong about something.
- gcbw2 7y ago
  consider the following example: You are going to visit example.com, a site which you have an account. You think your clipboard have the string "example.com". But while the browser opened, you clicked your password manager and already copied the password for it. (or for the sake of the example, you might have been typing an email you didn't not want to share, maybe it had financial information about your IPO... I am going with password as it is clearly something you want and need to keep private) When Chrome opens, you click the address bar and paste. See your mistake, press backspace a few types, type example.com and press return. Now google has on it's logs (and associated to your user profile) your example.com's password and you never had any feedback that it was sent, unless there was search results for your password (let's hope not)! Had you used firefox with autocomplete off (which you should) you would have seen the mistake before pressing return. or if you did press return, it would have been very clear to you that you just sent your password to google. So, defend it all you want, but it is a dark pattern that logs everything you type on a somewhat unrelated field and only show you feedback on certain cases. It is worlds apart from typing your credit card on amazon!
- pessimizer 7y ago
  How about an Amazon text field that takes your credit card number before you submit the form? There's no warning that a text field autocompletes, and no reason to assume all users are tech savvy enough to realize that google has to see every character typed to send back recommendations.
- yarrel 7y ago
  If the text field sent everything you type but didn't autocomplete, it would be spyware. Autocompleting doesn't change that. The Amazon text field would have to send your credit card number for a credit check without telling you to compare.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    The autocomplete provides a valuable service: it shows you suggestions for search terms; it's similar to if the credit card number is sent to the server and the server sends back whether or not the number is a valid credit card number (although this is now done on the client side). It can also be turned off extremely easy, not exactly what we know as "malware" if it allows you to turn off its "malicious" activities.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  >I'd naively consider a keylogger to be software that captures your keypresses universally. On Windows asking for a handler for all key presses will often trigger the antivirus, while asking for a single application often will not.
tylerl 7y ago
The costs? Are you joking? Of to the 2 Billion people using Chrome, point out just one for whom the privacy implications around autocomplete have imposed a non-theoretical cost. There's the cost you impose on yourself for paranoia, but lay THAT at the feet of the FSF. And if you say bandwidth you're fired. It's privacy the FSF is grumbling about. And for that it's been rhetoric and theoretical suffering, but no actual real-world damage. And not for lack of adoption. Put that cost in your pipe and smoke it.
- jmkb 7y ago
  If your browsing history is of value, than giving it (or even just the portions of it that are manually typed into the url bar) away is a cost to you. You can't point to a dollar amount on an invoice, so in that sense it's not "non-theoretical." But if you believe that personal information can be valuable -- and it's pretty clear that it can, especially in the aggregate -- then calling this a "cost" is not a joke.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    Unquantifiable externalities. At the end of the day, serverside autocomplete is useful, and coal is cheap!
    - ariwilson 7y ago
      My thermometer is a pretty clear indicator of a quantifiable externality of coal.
      - greyhair 7y ago
        Your thermometer is only a good indicator if it provides a comparison of the current temperature to the average temperature for that moment plus windowed samples over the last one hundred years. Otherwise, it just tells you the current temperature. </s>
  - adjkant 7y ago
    Google already stores your browsing history in the cloud if you're signed in, which most users are. The "keylogging" wouldn't really add any value to the data, and thus I don't really buy that cost. If you're not logged in, as I'm sure FSF people are, then this is a much bigger deal, but it doesn't apply to the vast majority of people. All that said, the keylogger would take a good deal of interpretation to get a complete or even partial history, since autocomplete choices would likely be chosen anyways, not fully typed out URL's. If they send that history anyways on any time you press enter, the autocomplete feature again doesn't matter because they have it with our with.

jammygit 7y ago

Years ago I used to assume autocompletions were performed on device, not sent to a server

chucksmash 7y ago

I'd naively consider a keylogger to be software that captures your keypresses universally. I use Firefox and have search suggestions disabled there so I am somewhat sympathetic to their point. That said, calling server-side autocomplete on a field you explicitly are typing in strikes me as about as sensible and forthright as calling an Amazon text field that takes my credit card number a card skimmer.

aflag 7y ago
There are keyloggers targeted to specific fields too. It depends on what vulnerability is being exploited to install a keylogger. I think the description of autocomplete as a keylogger is a good fit from the security perspective.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  No, as a keylogger is the term for a malware to capture ALL your keystrokes in secret (to usually later fish out the interesting ones like passwords). It is misleading, to mix it up with a software, that captures your textinput from a textfield, even though it is not communicated clearly to the average user that his text goes to a server.
davvolun 7y ago
> calling server-side autocomplete on a field you explicitly are typing in strikes me as about as sensible and forthright as calling an Amazon text field that takes my credit card number a card skimmer Exactly, and waters down the impact of the termminology. If "card skimmer" is anything that can read a credit card, than the term is meaningless for security. If "keylogger" is anything connected to the web that responds to a keypress... GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here.
- gregknicholson 7y ago
  > GNU is risking turning into the boy who cried wolf here. As with a lot of the FSF's messaging, I think the substance of the message may be correct, but the way they convey it just isn't effective. If this is for a general audience(!), no-one was ever convinced by the 48th item in a list who wasn't already convinced by the 47th. You don't persuade people just by being right, and certainly not by banging on about the very many subtly-different ways in which you're right. Pick few strong examples and prosecute those decisively. If this is a resource for campaigners, set out the audience and intent before you start. Preface it with something like “Here are various ways that certain aspects of Google's software can be seen as indistinguishable from malware. They may be useful counterarguments if someone suggests Google's software is trustworthy.”
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    There's a lot to appreciate about Stallman, but as an ideologue, he's never going to prioritize a gentle & incremental articulation of his ideas. We could call it a failure to empathize, but you see ideologues all over undermining their communication by making it as distilled & radical as possible. But that's not what tends to convince other humans they're wrong about something.
gcbw2 7y ago
consider the following example: You are going to visit example.com, a site which you have an account. You think your clipboard have the string "example.com". But while the browser opened, you clicked your password manager and already copied the password for it. (or for the sake of the example, you might have been typing an email you didn't not want to share, maybe it had financial information about your IPO... I am going with password as it is clearly something you want and need to keep private) When Chrome opens, you click the address bar and paste. See your mistake, press backspace a few types, type example.com and press return. Now google has on it's logs (and associated to your user profile) your example.com's password and you never had any feedback that it was sent, unless there was search results for your password (let's hope not)! Had you used firefox with autocomplete off (which you should) you would have seen the mistake before pressing return. or if you did press return, it would have been very clear to you that you just sent your password to google. So, defend it all you want, but it is a dark pattern that logs everything you type on a somewhat unrelated field and only show you feedback on certain cases. It is worlds apart from typing your credit card on amazon!
pessimizer 7y ago
How about an Amazon text field that takes your credit card number before you submit the form? There's no warning that a text field autocompletes, and no reason to assume all users are tech savvy enough to realize that google has to see every character typed to send back recommendations.
yarrel 7y ago
If the text field sent everything you type but didn't autocomplete, it would be spyware. Autocompleting doesn't change that. The Amazon text field would have to send your credit card number for a credit check without telling you to compare.
- judge2020 7y ago
  The autocomplete provides a valuable service: it shows you suggestions for search terms; it's similar to if the credit card number is sent to the server and the server sends back whether or not the number is a valid credit card number (although this is now done on the client side). It can also be turned off extremely easy, not exactly what we know as "malware" if it allows you to turn off its "malicious" activities.
fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
>I'd naively consider a keylogger to be software that captures your keypresses universally. On Windows asking for a handler for all key presses will often trigger the antivirus, while asking for a single application often will not.

tylerl 7y ago

The costs? Are you joking? Of to the 2 Billion people using Chrome, point out just one for whom the privacy implications around autocomplete have imposed a non-theoretical cost. There's the cost you impose on yourself for paranoia, but lay THAT at the feet of the FSF. And if you say bandwidth you're fired. It's privacy the FSF is grumbling about. And for that it's been rhetoric and theoretical suffering, but no actual real-world damage. And not for lack of adoption. Put that cost in your pipe and smoke it.

jmkb 7y ago
If your browsing history is of value, than giving it (or even just the portions of it that are manually typed into the url bar) away is a cost to you. You can't point to a dollar amount on an invoice, so in that sense it's not "non-theoretical." But if you believe that personal information can be valuable -- and it's pretty clear that it can, especially in the aggregate -- then calling this a "cost" is not a joke.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  Unquantifiable externalities. At the end of the day, serverside autocomplete is useful, and coal is cheap!
  - ariwilson 7y ago
    My thermometer is a pretty clear indicator of a quantifiable externality of coal.
    - greyhair 7y ago
      Your thermometer is only a good indicator if it provides a comparison of the current temperature to the average temperature for that moment plus windowed samples over the last one hundred years. Otherwise, it just tells you the current temperature. </s>
- adjkant 7y ago
  Google already stores your browsing history in the cloud if you're signed in, which most users are. The "keylogging" wouldn't really add any value to the data, and thus I don't really buy that cost. If you're not logged in, as I'm sure FSF people are, then this is a much bigger deal, but it doesn't apply to the vast majority of people. All that said, the keylogger would take a good deal of interpretation to get a complete or even partial history, since autocomplete choices would likely be chosen anyways, not fully typed out URL's. If they send that history anyways on any time you press enter, the autocomplete feature again doesn't matter because they have it with our with.