this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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[–] aceshigh@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Some of the records they have are silly. Ie: likely owns x router (well duh I just purchased it). But some are odd - “can touch type without looking at keyboard”. How did they figure that out?

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

About they track the time between key inputs when you're searching for something. God knows why though I can't imagine it being particularly useful information.

[–] aceshigh@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How they got that observation makes sense. There must be some assumptions about that then - like that perhaps I’m more tech savvy than most people (apparently 20% of people can do that), or perhaps I make more money than average and my prices should be higher. That’s probably it.

[–] AliasVortex@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

My naive/ innocent assumption would be that if you happened to purchase mechanical keyboard supplies you might be interested in blank key caps since you don't need the glyphs.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 points 20 hours ago

Speed of typing, time between clicking on the search bar and beginning to type, and how fast you correct typos since that requires you to be looking at the text while typing. Maybe also some theory-free inference if they're handing your browsing activity to ai, which they probably are. I'm not sure what else, but a lot of storefront time is typing, so they'd be able to build a lot of confidence about what your typing method is. It's one of the few things they could learn by directly observing your actions rather than browsing history.

[–] kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

If you have a webcam, is it possible they had some kind of software watching your eyes while you were typing? Or am I just being paranoid now

[–] aceshigh@lemmy.world 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I keep my camera closed. But I image the light would go on if I was being watched?

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 18 hours ago

It can be set not to turn on the light. Had an incident on an HP workstation where it said camera was off but it was broadcasting. Had to do some command line low level stuff to set the state of it to actually off. LED came on and off when toggle for web calls, but turning the camera off wasn't actually doing that.