31–40 of 99 posts
This sort of thing is useful as a signal when deciding if a user is who they say they are, but it's not sufficient on it's own.
What a huge nightmare waiting to happen. Sites already give me shit for changing my location, making me jump through additional hoops because my browser signature changed, refusing to let me purchase something because I don't access them from my home country. The last thing I need is a behavioral profiler that insists it has determined I'm not me and there is nothing I can do to prove it wrong.
Presumably, such a system would escalate to a more heavy weight authentication. We're already seeing something similar with sites trying to figure out if you're a bot or not. For example, if you make edits on stackoverflow, the site might decide to challenge you with a captcha from time to time.
I allege that this would have a huge number of false positives for no discernible reason to begin with, but on top of that: I might be on a different keyboard, using a different mouse, using a track pad, might be in bed lazily trying to log in with my laptop, might be injured, might be distracted, I might be in another country using an unfamiliar keyboard layout, a different screen size, the list goes on...
I wonder if it makes sense to disable some of that information in JavaScript. You couldn't disable it for js videogames, but I see no reason for most websites to be able to track your behavioral profile. The problem is that behavioral profiling will get better. How long you stay on a page, which links you prefer, and potentially a lot of the metrics that companies routinely use to A/B test their page would also revea…
These sorts of techniques have widespread applicability. Who needs facial recognition when you have kinematic behavioral analysis? Just imagine the trove of data you could pull from existing information sources if you had unlimited analytical time and computational power? As computing power becomes even cheaper and various analytical techniques become better our "effective privacy" window in our partially-anonymous s…
By the way, it's funny how often the discussions turn into "we need to stop technology X because evil advertisers will use it to do their evil things". It's not technology X that is the problem, it's evil advertisers that are assholes, and we need to find the way to get rid of the latter, not the former.
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Presumably, such a system would escalate to a more heavy weight authentication. We're already seeing something similar with sites trying to figure out if you're a bot or not. For example, if you make edits on stackoverflow, the site might decide to challenge you with a captcha from time to time.
The article doesn't make it sound like this would be a first line of defense, in fact the author seems quite adamant about its infallibility, but even if such algorithms would be used conservatively it would still be a huge hassle. Imagine every major website nudging you with a popup every once in a while: " we don't like the way you're typing, please use our code generator mobile app to prove it's still you ". I all…
I'm curious how much the ergonomics of your computer play into this... Log in from your laptop vs desktop and you're (presumably) going to have to have 1 profile for each.
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> Note how the article mentions that the gender can be determined after a few keystrokes, even though the user never entered that specific information. Research got median 88% accuracy testing subsets of 98 males and 35 females. Note that I got 74% accuracy on that data set by guessing male, male, male, male, male...
By knowing in advance what the ratio is. Such a great system will do really well in the real world. ( You have a very ironic username given the circumstances. )
In general, I don't believe it is possible to distinguish male and female typing patterns.
What you might be recognising is how people learned to type combined with the size of their hands - that might partly but not exactly break along gender lines. Bucketing people on that basis is just a recipe for awkwardness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These sorts of techniques have widespread applicability. Who needs facial recognition when you have kinematic behavioral analysis? Just imagine the trove of data you could pull from existing information sources if you had unlimited analytical time and computational power? As computing power becomes even cheaper and various analytical techniques become better our "effective privacy" window in our partially-anonymous s…
That's why I'm still entertaining the thought that we may be a "privacy vs. progress of mankind, chose one" type of situation. "These sorts of techniques" are the first scraches on the Great Web of Causality. I don't see a way to prevent it short of banning general-purpose computation. But are we going to deny ourselves all the advances in medicine, disaster relief, energy efficiency, etc. to protect ourselves from s…
At this point we have to drag out the heavy philosophical tools and ask: what do we mean by progress? The "Whig view of history" is one of incremental improvement towards better states, but it's reasonable to ask what we mean by "better" and how the progress itself affects our view on what is better.
We also need to bear in mind that it's not just future governments but present governments in various parts of the world that will weaponise technology for control purposes. Behavioural analysis as part of the Great Firewall of China?