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Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

gizmodo.com

131–140 of 174 posts

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#131
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many high-profile commercial carriers will do deep packet inspection of the traffic from their end users, so that they can do insertion of their own ads into whatever content you may be surfing. Including on your webmail pages. And their ad networks might well be infected with malware. But because of deep packet inspection and editing, you can't tell that the malvertising in question actually came from AT&T or Spectr…

How are they able to do ad insertion into a https page? I'm sure Google would not be happy with content injection into gmail.

Yeah,that doesn't make any sense, unless they're doing an MITM attack just to insert ads?

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#132
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older IM clients (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, et al.) could tell you if someone was typing or entered unsent text, but it never previewed what had been typed. At least that wasn't a default option back then.

ICQ had a character-by-character mode they experimented with for a while. It was kinda fun. BBSs too.

Character by character IS fun. I've always wondered why newer messaging platforms haven't implemented it yet.

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#133
post #37

I wish that it was more prevalent for people to just assume and know that any website, regardless of whether or not it has a chat function, has the ability to record what you're saying (read: typing). Everyone out there should act like everything they type into their web browser has the potential to be seen by, at the very least, the website they're typing it on and, at worst, by everyone online. If you really need t…

If the site is using SSL, there is a reasonable expectation that only the server will see that data, not the entire world.

Although you're technically right, my point is more along the lines of people just being in the default state of skepticism. Be as secure as you, personally, can possibly be and just assume that everyone else isn't following standard security protocols, that their SSLs are invalid, and that they're monitoring what you're typing.

It's similar to the old adage about driving: "Drive like everyone else is an idiot out to kill you. Don't be right, be predictable."

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#135
post #45

As I post this, every comment is "Derp if you're surprised, I mean this is how every site is. GOSH." However, you sure don't see this in the e.g. Munchery shutdown story. "90% (or whatever) of all startups fail, big whoop. Everybody with a decent understanding of business knows this."

It's not even true. This behaviour is not obvious at all. No consumer messaging application allows you to see what the other person is typing before they have sent it.

ICQ does.

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#136

I'm confused why this is news or surprising? At least for the audience here. I remember plugins for various IM clients would do the same thing in a chat window some decades ago. And I remember my days as a sysop in the good old single line dial up BBS days. You could watch users browse and type all the way back in the mid-80's and I'm sure this has existed about as long as multi-user computers have. If you're typing…

I am old, and I've been online since 1984, and I still make beginner mistakes because like anyone else, I've been trained to click through and forget the risks, when I am acting like a consumer of service.

Maybe you have more discipline, more sense of control and focus all the time. I don't and I know I am prone to making simplifying assumptions about things, because thats .. well .. human.

So.. I think either you are in denial about when you too make these kinds of mistakes "oh no: that only happens to other people, never happens to me" or .. you are a cyborg from the future.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NON-FOOLABLE ROBOT OVERLORDS

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#137
post #59

I can finally think of a practical reason to tell people to install Vim Anywhere! https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere I don't actually use that plugin but I have gotten the Vim keystrokes so ingrained in my brain that I've gotten in the habit of having a terminal open whenever I need to type into web forms...Now I finally have an excuse to not feel silly doing it.

How does this avoid the problem in the first place?

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#138

I use this to send messages to the agent that won't be recorded in the transcript because I delete it after typing it. Not sure if it has gotten me better results from the agents but it's fun to do.

Because I'm a fast typist, I sometimes swear at people and then delete what I have typed as a cathartic exercise if they're being annoying. I've done it since I was a teenager. It's like second nature, probably because I do it in my head too.

It's unsettling to know that a customer service agent would see that and think I'm being impolite.

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Password should be saved per-site. Like, I think they actually are.

You're right, that mitigates most of the risk. Firefox seems to save passwords per domain name. This may not be specific enough in certain cases. E.g., if I have a password on domain.com, but domain.com offers web hosting at domain.com/username, then my understanding is it would be relatively easy to obtain my credentials for domain.com with the right phishing site at domain.com/username. Correct me if I'm wrong.

In that case, cookies would be completely insecure as well

Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time

#140
For privacy minded people, is there an extension that detects textarea's and input boxes and overlays them with new ones and once you hit send that's when it inserts them into the real html inputs preventing this sneak peak?

Or perhaps simply the xhr requests could be blocked.

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