Privacy

40546 readers

483 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Can Github Copilot on VSCode see what I'm viewing on my browser? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 week ago by unicornBro@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm entering words from my browser into my code and Copilot guesses the word before I begin to type it. The only way it could know what I want to type 75% of the time, I think, is if it can see the website in my browser. Is this right?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago

Believe Microsoft, believe us... but verify.

I assume (but I haven't tried nor do I want to touch any of these) that you could verify using novel sequences, e.g. type in what you assume is isolated "This is a sentence and..." then try completion. You might get a result e.g. "is grammatically correct" or "I like potatoes". You can try that few times just to get some sample. Try then to try in the other context you assume might actually not be isolate, e.g. your browser "This is a sentence and noise is blue." and repeat that several times. If "noise is blue" never ever appeared before and it now does then you can safely assume that regardless of what Microsoft said, there is actually no isolation.

TL;DR: trust but verify. Yourself. Now.