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Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

jointoucan.com

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Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#21

Post by slg »

q3k wrote: post #11
dariusj18 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a screencast would be nice, but more than that, there's no Privacy Policy? Edit: there is, but they don't link to it on the homepage https://jointoucan.com/privacy-policy

Also that privacy policy says nothing, and seem to just be copy pasted from the Internet. If this is the company's approach on handling very private user data (ie. the contents of a number of websites they visit, including facebook, airbnb, office365, all of google.com), then this is a hard pass from me, and a huge red flag. EDIT: here's a list of all sites the extension accesses: https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj-GbID4…

Creating a set of whitelisted sites that this would work on is a better approach than other extensions like Grammarly have used in the past (not sure if they still do) and grant access to all browsing. However, this specific whitelist is such a weird combination of sites. It includes numerous financial and banking sites, porn sites, and e-commerce sites. Those are exactly the type of sites that I don't think you want on a whitelist as they are going to be full of information that people want private. This should probably be limited to sites with a lower likelihood of compromising data like news sites and potentially social media sites.

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#23

Post by ShaunMerritt »

Hey everyone! I'm Shaun Merritt, the Co-Founder and CTO of Toucan (jointoucan.com). Happy to answer any questions that you have about our product, and incredibly grateful for all the great feedback. I'll be jumping into some of the comments too. Excited for you all to give it a try. :)

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#25

Post by ShaunMerritt »

malnourish wrote: post #5

I get a mostly-empty page[0] on Win 10 with Firefox 76 and cookies blocked from cdnjs.cloudlfare and js.stripe. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/LHCYCCw.png

Hey there! I'm so sorry you're experiencing this. At Toucan we really truly want to help the whole world learn something new without having to disrupt their browsing experience. That being said, however, we are currently optimized for Chrome as we're currently a Chrome Extension only, but our intention is to build out extensions for other major browsers soon, and we will certainly up our game on browser support for our website. In the meantime, we'll be working on setting up a regression testing suite across the most popular browsers and ad blockers mentioned in this post to provide you all with a better experience. Again, I really appreciate the feedback and detailed explanations here, this will help tremendously as we build out these test suites and better Toucan.

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#26

Post by ShaunMerritt »

ivanstojic wrote: post #7

When I navigate to that page on my iOS device, all I see is a green upper bar with a hamburger menu. Clicking on the menu offers "log in" and "add toucan" I clicked back.

Hi there! I'm so sorry you experienced that. We are currently optimized for Chrome on desktop, but definitely should add a mobile warning about that on our mobile landing page. The blank page is due to content blockers on iOS, and we will be working to make sure that our site works with the most popular ad blockers and browsers going forward to give you a better experience. I really appreciate the feedback and detailed explanation here, this will help tremendously as we continue to better Toucan.

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#27

Post by ShaunMerritt »

Gys wrote: post #4

I can imagine a lot of ways how this might work, but the website does not explain much. Maybe it should have a short screencast as an example. Or at least screenshots. I also assume this collects a lot of data on the user? How is that handled?

Love that idea. We definitely want to add a gif of our product in action to showcase how it works. Lots of improvements coming on that front shortly.

Being a Chrome Extension, Toucan takes data and user privacy very seriously. We only collect data on the features you use within Toucan to better your user experience, and that information remains both anonymous and internal, and will never be sold or given to a third party.

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#28

Post by ShaunMerritt »

slg wrote: post #21
q3k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also that privacy policy says nothing, and seem to just be copy pasted from the Internet. If this is the company's approach on handling very private user data (ie. the contents of a number of websites they visit, including facebook, airbnb, office365, all of google.com), then this is a hard pass from me, and a huge red flag. EDIT: here's a list of all sites the extension accesses: https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj-GbID4…

Creating a set of whitelisted sites that this would work on is a better approach than other extensions like Grammarly have used in the past (not sure if they still do) and grant access to all browsing. However, this specific whitelist is such a weird combination of sites. It includes numerous financial and banking sites, porn sites, and e-commerce sites. Those are exactly the type of sites that I don't think you want…

Hey there! We definitely agree with you. While we were trying to avoid asking for permission to run on all sites before gaining our users trust, we also wanted to find the right balance of working on popular sites to show the value of Toucan. For this, we used a list of the top 500 sites around the world without any filter (which there definitely should have been). Thank you so much for pointing this out, as this was not our intention. We will be combing through this list shortly and updating to make sure Toucan is only enabled by default on sites that our users would feel comfortable with. Again, really appreciate your insight here, this is tremendously helpful.

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#29

Post by notechback »

ShaunMerritt wrote: post #27
Gys wrote: post #4

I can imagine a lot of ways how this might work, but the website does not explain much. Maybe it should have a short screencast as an example. Or at least screenshots. I also assume this collects a lot of data on the user? How is that handled?

Love that idea. We definitely want to add a gif of our product in action to showcase how it works. Lots of improvements coming on that front shortly. Being a Chrome Extension, Toucan takes data and user privacy very seriously. We only collect data on the features you use within Toucan to better your user experience, and that information remains both anonymous and internal, and will never be sold or given to a third p…

> Love that idea. We definitely want to ...

Hi Shaun, I appreciate the you take the time and respond to everyone here, but it's all "thank you I love the idea" with rather platitude answers (plenty of chrome extensions do not take privacy seriously..). It sounds like an interesting premise but so far there's no info on what toucan does. Could you try to explain a bit some of the basic questions people have here?

E.g.

- what exactly am I learning? Can you give an example? Is it just factoids? - how does toucan work? What are the sources of learning content? - is there any pedagogy or methodology apart from showing relevant info next to sites I'm looking at? - what is your business model? Ads mixed in with the learning content? A banner ad related to the content? Selling usage statistics? Scraping websites for a search engine? ...? Clarifying this would also clarify... - why should I trust you with my browsing data?

Good luck in any case - but a bit more info would be appreciated :-)

Re: Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web

#30

Post by slg »

ShaunMerritt wrote: post #28
slg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a set of whitelisted sites that this would work on is a better approach than other extensions like Grammarly have used in the past (not sure if they still do) and grant access to all browsing. However, this specific whitelist is such a weird combination of sites. It includes numerous financial and banking sites, porn sites, and e-commerce sites. Those are exactly the type of sites that I don't think you want…

Hey there! We definitely agree with you. While we were trying to avoid asking for permission to run on all sites before gaining our users trust, we also wanted to find the right balance of working on popular sites to show the value of Toucan. For this, we used a list of the top 500 sites around the world without any filter (which there definitely should have been). Thank you so much for pointing this out, as this was…

Good on you for acknowledging that is a problem and moving to fix it. The existing list makes a lot more sense now that I know it is just the top 500 sites.

I think you generally want to stick to sites that are both public and consumption oriented. News sites and places like Wikipedia are the obvious examples. Social media is a little more questionable since there is a mix of public and private data. I think an ideal system would break sites out into categories like news, education, pop culture, social media, etc. You then allow the users to either turn off a category as a whole or provide an advanced mode to manually disable individual sites. Although it has been a while since I messed with browser extension permissions so I don't remember if these permissions can even be set on a conditional basis. Either way, there can always be an option in the extension settings to ignore those pages even if the browser technically gives you permissions to them.

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