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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Right, the argument is logged keystrokes never leave your phone because that amount of data from each Android/Blackberry phone would be a lot more thn 10 GB a day. I agree though, why are they logging it at all if the app isn't sending it to them? Very suspicious.

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You, uh... you can enter 10 GB of text on your phone per day? I think maybe if you recorded all of the touch events, you'd end up with many megabytes worth, but I doubt the average user will enter more than a few kilobytes worth of text in a day.

That's a figure for all phones, not each phone. Read EwanToo's comment towards the top.

Text can be significantly compressed.

Yes I know. Unless the app sorts out valuable information from noise (passwords, account numbers, etc), I think this conspiracy theory is invalid.

I agree with you they will very easily record all the touch events. If you were typing 10 characters per second (which already seems like quite a lot) after 24h you will not even have a megabyte of information. Just over a megabyte if you encode the character in Unicode. ;-) This is without even take into account that this information can be heavily compressed for the transfert.

There's 144 million phones with it deployed, the figure is the total for them all.

I read "that amount of data from each Android/Blackberry phone would be a lot more thn 10 GB a day." as "each device is generating over 10 GB a day." It makes more sense as a total, and really, 10 GB a day is NOTHING. In scientific computing, terabytes a day isn't too unusual, so it's certainly no big deal to store and process 10 GB a day.

First, don't trust a recruiter's technical information.

Second, maybe they are selling the information to other parties by letting the other parties grab the information themselves.

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