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Microsoft Patents A User-Monitoring AI That Improves Search Results (hothardware.com)
Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes a HotHardware article about Microsoft's new patent filing for an OS "mediation component":
This is Microsoft's all-seeing-eye that monitors all textual input within apps to intelligently decipher what the user is trying to accomplish. All of this information could be gathered from apps like Word, Skype, or even Notepad by the Mediator and processed. So when the user goes to, for example, the Edge web browser to further research a topic, those contextual concepts are automatically fed into a search query.
The search engine (e.g., Bing and Cortana) uses contextual rankers to adjust the ranking of the default suggested queries to produce more relevant [results]. The operating system...tracks all textual data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user intent (contextually).
The article argues this feels "creepy and big brother-esque," and while Microsoft talks of defining a "task continuum," suggests the patent's process "would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."
The search engine (e.g., Bing and Cortana) uses contextual rankers to adjust the ranking of the default suggested queries to produce more relevant [results]. The operating system...tracks all textual data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user intent (contextually).
The article argues this feels "creepy and big brother-esque," and while Microsoft talks of defining a "task continuum," suggests the patent's process "would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."
that I'm moving to Linux.
Agreed. A lot of us envisioned these sorts of "intelligent agents" many years ago, but I think we always envisioned they'd be local agents, or under our control somehow. Probably a bit naive, I guess.
Even so, the problem with using a local agent is that it would be difficult to automatically synchronize this information across all your devices. That's the benefit of a cloud-based service. The downside? Someone else has complete access to all the most intimate details of your life. And what privacy guarantees do we have? A "we promise" statement from the company that they won't abuse that power. Nevermind that all that data is a virtual goldmine to advertising agencies... I'm sure we can trust them.
I think that this could be done locally (and share an encrypted database in a service like Dropbox, etc), but there's no incentive for a corporation NOT to keep all that personal data in their own cloud. They'd have to work harder to cut out their own ecosystem and protect the user's privacy. And frankly, it would be harder for the end-user to use, and less convenient than using Cortana, Siri, Alexa, or Google's bots. It would be tough for such a system to gain widespread adoption. And we've seen, via Linux as a desktop OS, that simply being free and open is NOT enough to drive mass adoption.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I hate this sort of thing. Not just for the surveillance problem, that's self-evident how awful it is.
I hate it because I want a search engine to give me clean results for every search. I search for very different things for very different reasons, and they don't frequently have anything to do with anything I'm typing in an app. Having even my previous searches coloring the results I get is worse than unhelpful, it's actively detrimental.
If I'm searching for an app install failure, I don't want results related to the movie I was looking for yesterday, and I don't want results related to the Arizona Revised Statutes search I did an hour ago to answer a legal question for a friend. And I certainly don't want it to know about the sales proposal I typed up earlier today.