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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

Creepy. Why on Earth would you build something like this?

Amazing how people in tech are so flippant about building tools that are almost exclusively useful for tyrants.

I really don't think that this is a fair appraisal of this. It's a really novel look into how our habits identify us and the creation of it, in itself, doesn't reflect any mal-intent. If you're really so disheartened by the potential use-cases of typing ID like this, you are now aware of it in the first place! You could set out to build a simple tool that randomly adds noise to your keyboard IO and effectively stops this from working. Past that, this is something that others have almost certainly already figured out (be it big tech or government entities) but, even if they hadn't, creation like this is cannot be considered a wrongful act because it's impossible to know the long-term effects of anything before it exists.

1) You should definitely research who Fedor Indutny is.

2) If you think companies aren't already doing this, you're lying to yourself.

3) This is a harmless experiment made to spotlight how simple it is to identify someone just by their typing. This could be used in a multitude of ways.

4) Stop generalizing "people in tech", and stop assuming everyone builds stuff for no reason. This is a deliberate experiment, made on purpose, for a very good reason.

Pretty sure bank apps do this for fraud prevention. Preventing criminals from stealing your money is pretty altruistic

I don't think I've ever had to type a sentence into a bank app, much less 30-40.

You've probably typed a username or password hundreds of times though, or at least a fair portion of their userbase has. "This user normally types their password in 3 seconds but today they did it in 0.2 seconds" is a reasonable way to raise a red (or at least yellow) flag.

I pretty much exclusively use 1pass, so there's not much information there on the bank fill side of things.

No, banks won’t do this, most banks still struggle with basics like storing passwords securely.

Coursera uses this to make sure exams are given by the same person who registers for the course.

Why would you think "people in tech" are some homogenous group to generalize about?

Unfortunately, tyrants often pay well.

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