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Comment by 31098347 | Hacker News Reader

There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.

(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.

(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?

Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.

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Grammarly is also an OS-wide keylogger.

https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-ca...

They claim not to be a keylogger, but, you know, Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word. So, I'd take their claims with a lot of salt.

> Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word

Strictly Alexa, the device, is always listening in order to trigger on the wake word. It's just that audio doesn't get sent to Amazon until it hears a wake word (then it just streams the audio to Amazon to process it. locally it's only smart enough to listen for a wake word). This is verifiable from sniffing network traffic, it's not sending enough to be a live audio stream at all times unless the wake word is said.

You'd agree that this creates a hypertechnical situations where slight changes in the hardware or software create undetectable situations for non-technical consumers. For example, we do not know for certain that Alexa devices never stream audio when they have not yet processed the wake word. A device that you test it on may have a different policy from a device sold a year from now, yet the Internet (archives) will say that, no, it doesn't listen.

Google hid a microphone in its Nest Protect product. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a264489...

That's very true, yeah. Can't speak for every Alexa, every version, the future, etc.

Snowden called this "turnkey tyranny." The idea that the technology for dystopia already exists and is widely distributed, but the key simply hasn't been turned yet.

All it would take for Amazon (or whichever government twists their arm) to listen to millions of households surreptitiously is a quiet software update.

Grammarly really is a keylogger though. In a "plain text being sent to a remote server" kind of way.

> Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail.

Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?

There is a big difference from the 'possibility' of adding remote reporting of local data (essentially zero for e.g. Word 95) vs. the possibility of having a server do one more thing with information already on the server (trivially easy)

Yet they didn't do anything remotely similar for 40 years.

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