8 ms·
> Is there a reason why that text needs to be sent before the user clicks the "translate" button? Yes - UX latency. I would expect this kind of thing to take a
by fouric 6y ago
> Is there a reason why that text needs to be sent before the user clicks the "translate" button?
Yes - UX latency. I would expect this kind of thing to take a few thousand milliseconds, and shaving off a few hundred milliseconds from between when the user highlights text and when they select "translate" is significant. The fact that this data is being sent to Wikipedia of all places further signals that the usage is likely to be innocuous.
Do I think that this is globally a good design decision? No, for both engineering and privacy reasons. There's definitely no good reason why it should be sent to Amazon at all.
- falcolas 6y ago> There's definitely no good reason why it should be sent to Amazon at all. I was wracking my brain on this, and all I could come up with was "to independently verify the invoicing for Bing translations" and "how many times are people accessing the definition/translation and not highlighting". So, analytics, not something that explicitly benefits the user.
- benmller313 6y agoCan we stop pretending that analytics don't explicitly benefit the user? Product Engineering organizations rely on analytics to improve user experiences.
- naikrovek 6y agoAnalytics can be done less granularly and still benefit the user. Also, surely not every data point collected is used to benefit the user. For example, Amazon doesn't need to know where I am when I request a definition or translation. If they're concerned about usage, they only need to know how many times I actually used one or both of those features per day, per week, or month. They don't need to know instantly every single time a word is highlighted.
- edanm 6y ago> Analytics can be done less granularly and still benefit the user. Also, surely not every data point collected is used to benefit the user. How? For all we know, it isn't granular - it might be aggregated at the server level to hide specific user's actions. But they'd still need to be sending in the data from the device to the server.
- wongarsu 6y agoThe device could keep a daily count of interesting actions, and sync that to analytics servers on a daily or weekly basis. That preserves 95% of legitimate use cases while leaking much less private data (like how my reading habits are distributed across the day)
- edanm 6y agoI mean, you're still collecting most of the problematic data. And you might legitimately be interested in what you're leaving out - knowing time of day that people do things is actually important for plenty of use cases.
- luckylion 6y agoWhen you play an online slot game where you bet money that some numbers will appear on screen, and they use analytics to "improve user experience" (read: engagement, read: you losing more money), is that benefiting you or is it benefiting them?
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI'm surprised you'd say that. Out of interest, how does analytics help websites not use blathery, unhelpful text in overly-small fonts, done too-pale to make them unreadable. A lot of UI failings are of this most basic kind.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThey can but they're often much more than that. Also it should really be opt in. Our at least opt out. I hate Amazon looking over my shoulder while reading a book.
- patcul100 6y agoThat's why I don't use their reading app and use a custom OS.
- SamReidHughes 6y agoThe word choice we want here is directly vs. indirectly.
- bberenberg 6y agoKindle devices have a dictionary on device. By looking into which words are most frequently defined, they can add these to the local dictionary to help improve the speed of the UI.
- freeone3000 6y agoThe screen refresh rate on these devices is measured in seconds, so a few hundred millis of network latency is impossible to display.
- fouric 6y agoThis isn't universally true - Dan Luu's computer latency page[1] lists three Kindles, all below 900 ms of latency. And, since some devices have latency as low as 570 ms, it makes sense that they would use this optimization. [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shajznnckfke 6y agoThat doesn’t seem right. Let’s consider the screen refresh to be like a subway station, where the train shows up every few seconds. We need the text we want to show to the user to be at the stop waiting when the train arrives. If we miss the train, we need to wait for the next train to get our text on the screen. The network latency delays when we show up to wait at the station. If the refresh rate is 5 seconds, and the network response time is 500ms, than eliminating the 500ms response time means we are 10% less likely to miss the train. On average, the time for the text to appear on the screen decreases by 500ms. All this assumes the refreshes happening on a static schedule. If the software can trigger the refresh, then it’s a lot simpler. The 500ms improvement in latency would apply equally to every engagement with the translate feature.
- freeone3000 6y agoThere's no static schedule. It's an e-ink display. Refreshes happen when software tells it to display something new and take several hundred millis per blank - and a screen can be up to three blanks (because if it doesn't go white-black-display, then some pixels get stuck "on" or "off" or "halfway").