Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.