Slightly related: In the paper Leidner and Plachouras (2017), we reported an observation initially due to Bentley, namely that the McIllroy spell(1) implementa

Slightly related: In the paper Leidner and Plachouras (2017), we reported an observation initially due to Bentley, namely that the McIllroy spell(1) implementation emailed a list of unknown words when it was run over a document to the author. While technically, this is a neat way to increase dictionary size by "mining user data", and certain versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Edge (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208333 ) had the same behavior, it is privacy-violating at least if users are not informed beforehand [1]. Of course this has to be seen in the cultural context of the UNIX community at the time (people were even weary of using passwords then to protect their accounts), but still harm could be done if an email tasked about "malinoma" when that term was still absent from the dictionary, possibly revealing a sensitive condition of the email author or their circle of friends and family to a third party, the software engineer of the speel checker. [1] https://aclanthology.org/W17-1604.pdf https://aclanthology.org/W17-1604.pdf