Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylerl | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Unquantifiable externalities.

At the end of the day, serverside autocomplete is useful, and coal is cheap!

My thermometer is a pretty clear indicator of a quantifiable externality of coal.

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>

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.

Your browsing history, as a rule, is not actually valuable in any meaningful sense. If it were, then your cost would then have to be an opportunity cost, the lost opportunity to sell which you didn't take. Except if that's the case, it's not the autocomplete that stopped you; you could sell your history still anyway, autocomplete or no.

Also, your aggregate value argument is quite apt: It's valuable to know what percentage of a city speaks English, but the fact that you personally do or don't is of no real value at all, specifically because it's "your" individual data, not despite the fact. And insisting that you've been hypothetically robbed of your entitled half penny for disclosing your language preference to the McDonalds cashier is precisely as sensible as complaining about the value of your half-typed URLs.

> point out just one for whom the privacy implications around autocomplete have imposed a non-theoretical cost

Type "p" in the address bar at work?

paycomonline.com

Don't visit sites on work computers you don't want others to know about!

And again, you're talking hypothetical. Anything is harmful in theory. I can think of a thousand ways in which privacy itself is harmful in theory, it's not even hard. But unless it actually happens somewhere to someone it's quite likely my assumptions are faulty.

> 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.

You've never accidentally typed a password in a URL bar? You've never accidentally focussed the browser window when typing something you don't want Google or anyone else to know?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com