Carefully with Per Axbom

A rarely talked about field of research, known as keystroke dynamics, involves identifying individuals based on how they type on a keyboard. It's getting better, and also easier for anyone to implement.

As early as 1860, experienced telegraph operators realized they could actually recognize each individual by everyone's unique tapping rhythm. To the trained ear, the soft tip-tap of every operator could be as recognizable as the spoken voice of a family member.

Blog post: Your unique typing rhythm can reveal your identity

Digital tools, smart devices, AI and virtual worlds are celebrated for the problems they solve, while the problems they create are concealed or glossed over.
My name is Per Axbom and I’m a Swedish communication theorist born in Liberia. My international upbringing, my early 80s computer enthusiasm, aligned with a passion for responsible innovation, has resulted in a deep concern for human rights in a digital context.
I want to boost general knowledge about harmful impact and encourage balanced and honest conversations about possible, plausible and desirable futures.
After blogging for more than 25 years about the human perspective in digitalisation I am adding to my channels yet another podcast. You get brief insights in episodes around 7 minutes that can be listened to on a whim, and from time to time some longer expansions on current phenomena.
Do use the episodes as triggers for reflection but also conversation with people in your circles of trust.
The future is not predetermined and not something we can just leave to others to decide over. The future is something we together contribute to through our decisions. But this means we must also better understand the consequences of what we ourselves are doing today. And right now.
To guide the content I would love to hear from you. What makes you curious? What do you feel is hard to grasp in this rapidly changing world? What you think media is getting wrong and deserves a better explanation? How are you affected when it comes to attention, self-determination and health?

Get in touch by emailing [email protected].

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It's never more easy to get scammed than during an ongoing hype. It's March 2023 and we're in the middle of one. Rarely have I seen so many people embrace a brand new experimental solution with so little questioning. Right now, it's important to shake off any mass hypnosis and examine the contents of this new bottle of AI that many have started sipping, or have already started refueling their business computers with. Sometimes outside the knowledge of management.

AI, a term that became an academic focus in 1956, has today mostly morphed into a marketing term for technology companies. The research field is still based on a theory that human intelligence can be described so precisely that a machine can be built that completely simulates this intelligence. But the word AI, when we read the paper today, usually describes different types of computational models that, when applied to large amounts of information, are intended to calculate and show a result that is the basis for various forms of predictions, decisions and recommendations.

Clearly weak points in these computational models then become, for example:

• how questions are asked of the computational model (you may need to have very specific wording to get the results you want),
• the information it relies on to make its calculation (often biased or insufficient),
• how the computational model actually does its calculation (we rarely get to know that because the companies regard it as their proprietary secret sauce, which is referred to as black box), and
• how the result is presented to the operator* (increasingly as if the machine is a thinking being, or as if it can determine a correct answer from a wrong one).

The operator is the one who uses, or runs, the tool.

What we call AI colloquially today is still very far from something that 'thinks' on its own. Even if texts that these tools generate can resemble texts written by humans, this isn't stranger than the fact that the large amount of information that the computational model uses is written by humans. The tools are built to deliver answers that look like human answers, not to actually think like humans.

Or even deliver a correct answer.

It is exciting and titillating to talk about AI as self-determining. But it is also dangerous. Add to this the fact that much of what is marketed and sold as AI today is simply not AI. The term is extremely ambiguous and has a variety of definitions that have also changed over time. This means very favorable conditions for those who want to mislead.

Problems often arise when the philosophical basis of the academic approach is mixed with lofty promises of the technology's excellence by commercial players. And the public, including journalists, of course cannot help but associate the technology with timeless stories about dead things suddenly coming to life.

Clip from the film Frankenstein (1931) where the doctor proclaims that the creature he created is alive. "It's alive!" he shouts again and again.

It's almost like that's the exact association companies want people to make.

We love confident personalities even when they are wrong

Many tech companies seem so obsessed with the idea of ​​a thinking machine that they go out of their way to make their solutions appear thinking and feeling when they really aren't.

With Microsoft's chatbot for Bing, for example, someone decided that in its responses it should randomly shower its operator with emoji symbols. It is the organization's design decision to make the machine more human, of course not something that the chatbot itself "thought of". It is – no matter how boring it sounds and no matter how much you try to make it "human" by having it express personal well-wishes – still an inanimate object without sensations. Even when it is perceived as "speaking its mind".

OpenAI's ChatGPT, in turn, expresses most of its responses with a seemingly incurable assertiveness. Regardless of whether the answers are right or wrong. In its responses, the tool may create references to works that do not exist, attribute to people opinions they never expressed, or repeat offensive sentiments. If you happen to know that it is wrong and point this out, it begs forgiveness. As if the chatbot itself could be remorseful.

Then, in the very next second, it can deliver a completely new and equally incorrect answer.

I can't get the noise out of my head. People who watch the video express awe and disgust. And that is why Dutch software developer Bert Hubert's experiment is so powerful. It doesn't really uncover something that we shouldn't already know. Something we often choose to ignore. The brilliance is that it makes us incapable of ignoring.

Bert himself explains that he has had the idea for years. It's one of those things that live on in the back of your mind, until one day the stars align and you finally find that block of time when your idea surfaces at the same time.

Bert's idea appears simple:

So this is what he did. A piece of software dubbed googerteller designed for his Linux computer that emits a scratchy beep when the computer detects information flowing out from his computer to one of Google's computers.

And here is what his first video looks like. Or rather, sounds like. It's when visiting the official Dutch government jobs site. Bert notes that it does not ask for consent for this data transfer.

Take note in the beginning when each character in the search query sends data to google in order to trigger the search suggestions.

Video by Bert Hubert

Levelling up with more trackers

After announcing the tool in a tweet the video quickly received over a million views. Spurred by this attention Bert decided to develop his tool further and include trackers not only from Google but also Facebook and dozens of other trackers.

When visiting some popular news sites, this is now what his computer sounds like:

Video by Bert Hubert

Even though I personally am acutely aware that this tracking is happening on most sites we visit today, the video and its noise still make me shiver. In case you are hard of hearing, the noise in the second video is almost constant, ongoing even as Bert is just scrolling.

It's not only about the data transfer itself. Imagine the amount of network traffic required when this happens to everyone active online. And the storage and CPU power required to process it all. Yeah, you get it.

The power of transparency

When we talk about transparency we often talk about letting people know what is going on. But it's generally the case that transparency in worded explanations and reports is hard to digest and understand. This experiment shows what can happen when people begin to understand differently. A real-time audio explanation gives new meaning to transparency.

And I believe this is only a first step. Check out Bert's post where he talks about some ideas to take the tool further, including a public live demo installation.

I personally would of course like to see a tool like this available on more platforms. And there is a lot of opportunity to allow users to add trackers and select sounds for different trackers. And of course to add the option of visual feedback for people who can not hear, such as bubbles appearing and popping for each information transfer.

For a person like myself it would almost turn into a game seeing what trackers I manage to block in my Hosts file and which ones make it through.

If someone with more skills than me is building something along these lines I would definitely be interested in contributing with design ideas. I talk a lot about awareness, and this is one of those types of tools that I believe would encourage a lot more people to have important conversations, and take action.

Thank you Bert.

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As early as 1860, experienced telegraph operators realized they could actually recognize each individual by everyone's unique tapping rhythm. To the trained ear, the soft tip-tap of every operator could be as recognizable as the spoken voice of a family member.

In World War II military intelligence used a methodology known as "Fist of the Sender" to identify unique ways of keying in a message's "dots" and "dashes" in Morse code. It was used to distinguish friend from foe. The pace and style of the communication allowed expert operators to deduce who was in the other end.

The more you type, the more of your unique qualities can be collected and identified

Even if people type on keyboards at approximately the same speed, everyone will have specific pauses, sequences and hold-times for certain letters that are true only for them. The more of these variables we have access to, the more certain we can be of a person's identity.

Common misspellings, errors, preferred words, punctuation, capitalisation and use of emojis will of course all play into this data. The more that is known, the closer confidence levels come to being the equivalent of a biometric fingerprint.

The behavioral biometric identifier retrieved through input via keyboard, known as keystroke dynamics, of course only gets better over time - able to take into account that your typing varies over a day or days and can be affected by external factors.

Your typing style can identify you in otherwise anonymized data

As you will likely be aware by now, this technique can of course be used to de-anonymize anyone wanting to appear anonymous online. So whatever security precautions you may have taken, keystroke logging may very well be enough to identify you.

Want to stay under the radar? Random taping of fingers, wearing gloves or consuming an alcoholic beverage may fool some software. But don't forget to also develop your vocabulary.

Note that keylogging is illegal in most countries (akin to wiretapping) and hopefully not employed as much as you might fear. But the data is very easy to collect in a digital world, by any website, and often the creators of software aren't thinking ahead on potential misuse — or maybe aren't even aware that what they are doing is illegal. Facebook was saving everything you typed, even when you didn't hit publish, very early on. TikTok today saves keystrokes when you use their internal web browser.

Who is doing what these days is not always obvious, and sometimes the logging itself is done under the guise of enhanced security, sometimes valid and sometimes not. But once again: consumer control is essentially non-existent. Awareness is all we can spread.

In 1844, on May 24, Samuel Morse sent an historic telegraph message from Washington, D.C. to Alfred Vail in Baltimore, Maryland. The message read

This question perhaps invites more reflection than the modern-day oft-used sanity test : "Hello world".

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