To varying extents, saying you don't do this is really hard for any third party application integrated into a website. Unfortunately, we can't pull up contextual search results about a text selection without consulting a third party service like Bing or Duck Duck Go, so I doubt that we'll be able to do much better than offering an "opt out" feature in our UI."
Well, this was specifically something apture did that was broken. In their implementation, they captured every text selection regardless of whether I wanted to just cut and paste it, or have it be searched for, or was just absently clicking and thinking. Presumably, you only have to pull contextualize it, if I have asked for that behavior, and even so, it should be possible to do most/all of that in my browser, and never at your servers.
Thank you for clarifying what you meant by this. As it turns out, we actually changed the behavior at the last minute to do a search query every time text is selected (which is what I believe you are saying is bad about Apture). We made this change because we figured it would be a better experience for users if the larger window were populated with search results as soon as it expanded.
However, now that you've framed it from a privacy perspective, it is obvious to me how this can feel really invasive. The intent to search should activate the query. Thanks for the constructive suggestion!
To varying extents, saying you don't do this is really hard for any third party application integrated into a website. Unfortunately, we can't pull up contextual search results about a text selection without consulting a third party service like Bing or Duck Duck Go, so I doubt that we'll be able to do much better than offering an "opt out" feature in our UI."
Well, this was specifically something apture did that was broken. In their implementation, they captured every text selection regardless of whether I wanted to just cut and paste it, or have it be searched for, or was just absently clicking and thinking. Presumably, you only have to pull contextualize it, if I have asked for that behavior, and even so, it should be possible to do most/all of that in my browser, and never at your servers.