"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
I may be the exception, but if I plan to work on non-work related stuff while traveling I absolutely take my personal laptop. I've done this when traveling to my HQ, as well as taking both work and personal laptops on personal vacations.
This must be you being in a different bubble from me, with perhaps a hint of Normalization of Deviance[0]. Those all sound like terrible ideas to me (are you implying looking at porn on a company laptop!?). You absolutely should not cross pollinate work with personal stuff. Use your personal phone or tablet or whatever for anything non work related.
It was a rhetorical question; I am aware that people do stupid things with their employers' hardware. More directly, my point was that the supposed privacy questions raised by the AI-training keyboard tracking system do not matter much, because it has never been safe to do anything which requires personal privacy on work devices in the first place.
There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
If only we all could rise to the level of not doing stupid things on company property (praise), or company time (praise), then we would want for no privacy for there was never any to be taken in the first place.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
> You seem to have selected specifically people who are not likely to know the full implications of their behavior, and I agree with you.
You mean every person in the world who doesn't actively work on the stuff doing the tracking? This isn't selection bias, selection bias is thinking those are the abnormals.
I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat.
So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.