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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how far they could go in compelling Signal to push a change that let more info leak for a specific user. I know there have been somewhat similar cases where companies were compelled to add new functionality, logs, etc, to capture info for a specific user.

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I'm surprised the FBI has tried to get a custom keyboard into the Play Store yet, or asked Google to add a key logger to the stock one. Sure, the legality is blury at the moment, but it's just a matter of changing some laws and then that becomes legal.

They could just product a service that masquerades as a grammar checker provider.

Come to think of it, that'd be the perfect place to go to demand a wiretap - at least one such popular "LY" service already exists.

I'm still shaking my head at what many regular users will agree to..

I’m curious whether there’s a big overlap between people that the FBI is interested in and people who care about grammar. That’s not a flippant response: I’m genuinely curious if that is part of a shift towards white collar crimes (which could be welcome) and more generally criminal psychology.

I’ve been watching _The Wire_ and Idris Elba’s character sounds like a good overlap, but he feels very unusual (in fiction)--and definitely too careful about OpSec to use that kind of service.

More generally, there’s a lot of anecdotic evidence between problematic behaviour and low-level spelling details: one that is apparently better documented now is a correlation between insurance fraud and whether you capitalise properly the name of your employer on registration form.

It is perfectly possible to be a grammarly user and not upload everything to it, but if I am running a script or draft of a blog post through it, what harm is there?

I thought google collects everything put into Gboard anyway? (Maybe just if swipe is enabled)

If you want to call it that, perhaps. The actual tech: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...

I assume Google's reports back already. They need that for ML training.

According to Google, Gboard uses Federating Learning to train a model on user data on the local device, so no sensitive data is not sent to the server. Only the gradients are sent and aggregated on the server. https://research.google/pubs/pub47586/

Google has been pretty adamant for years that they don't use or retain your Gboard data, unless you're typing it into search or some Google product that gathers it there. Prediction is supposedly done in-app.

Might go full idiotic like the Australian government and mandate backdoors

Every time I see similar questions, I just wonder why companies such as Signal do not put in place a mechanism to veto changes across countrie.

If they had developers in, say, France, who would need to accept changes made somewhere else then a single country could not force such secret modifications.

Of course an app is actually a binary, so there must be a way to verify that code + compilation = the published binary.

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