[Gys]

I can imagine a lot of ways how this might work, but the website does not explain much. Maybe it should have a short screencast as an example. Or at least screenshots.

I also assume this collects a lot of data on the user? How is that handled?

[dariusj18]

Yes, a screencast would be nice, but more than that, there's no Privacy Policy?

Edit: there is, but they don't link to it on the homepage

https://jointoucan.com/privacy-policy

[q3k]

Also that privacy policy says nothing, and seem to just be copy pasted from the Internet.

If this is the company's approach on handling very private user data (ie. the contents of a number of websites they visit, including facebook, airbnb, office365, all of google.com), then this is a hard pass from me, and a huge red flag.

EDIT: here's a list of all sites the extension accesses: https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj-GbID4#g7IYwrXiF6zXlnlxQYguMlr...

EDIT2: looking at the source code of the extension (extracted from the source map), it at least tracks and sends off any tab hostname (or URL?) you've visited: https://paste.q3k.org/paste/gxklokkF#055mmZ9Qu-zeiAwXGpWqSpw... , for any of the URLs in the allowed URLs list (which in turn has some websites whitelisted that you really might not want others to know you have visited)

EDIT3: if I read the code correctly, they actually send off the entire URL, not just the hostname. But someone would have to check this in practice to be sure.

[slg]

Creating a set of whitelisted sites that this would work on is a better approach than other extensions like Grammarly have used in the past (not sure if they still do) and grant access to all browsing. However, this specific whitelist is such a weird combination of sites. It includes numerous financial and banking sites, porn sites, and e-commerce sites. Those are exactly the type of sites that I don't think you want on a whitelist as they are going to be full of information that people want private. This should probably be limited to sites with a lower likelihood of compromising data like news sites and potentially social media sites.

[ShaunMerritt]

Hey there! We definitely agree with you. While we were trying to avoid asking for permission to run on all sites before gaining our users trust, we also wanted to find the right balance of working on popular sites to show the value of Toucan. For this, we used a list of the top 500 sites around the world without any filter (which there definitely should have been). Thank you so much for pointing this out, as this was not our intention. We will be combing through this list shortly and updating to make sure Toucan is only enabled by default on sites that our users would feel comfortable with. Again, really appreciate your insight here, this is tremendously helpful.

[slg]

Good on you for acknowledging that is a problem and moving to fix it. The existing list makes a lot more sense now that I know it is just the top 500 sites.

I think you generally want to stick to sites that are both public and consumption oriented. News sites and places like Wikipedia are the obvious examples. Social media is a little more questionable since there is a mix of public and private data. I think an ideal system would break sites out into categories like news, education, pop culture, social media, etc. You then allow the users to either turn off a category as a whole or provide an advanced mode to manually disable individual sites. Although it has been a while since I messed with browser extension permissions so I don't remember if these permissions can even be set on a conditional basis. Either way, there can always be an option in the extension settings to ignore those pages even if the browser technically gives you permissions to them.

[ShaunMerritt]

Love that idea. We definitely want to add a gif of our product in action to showcase how it works. Lots of improvements coming on that front shortly.

Being a Chrome Extension, Toucan takes data and user privacy very seriously. We only collect data on the features you use within Toucan to better your user experience, and that information remains both anonymous and internal, and will never be sold or given to a third party.

[notechback]

> Love that idea. We definitely want to ...

Hi Shaun, I appreciate the you take the time and respond to everyone here, but it's all "thank you I love the idea" with rather platitude answers (plenty of chrome extensions do not take privacy seriously..). It sounds like an interesting premise but so far there's no info on what toucan does. Could you try to explain a bit some of the basic questions people have here?

E.g.

- what exactly am I learning? Can you give an example? Is it just factoids? - how does toucan work? What are the sources of learning content? - is there any pedagogy or methodology apart from showing relevant info next to sites I'm looking at? - what is your business model? Ads mixed in with the learning content? A banner ad related to the content? Selling usage statistics? Scraping websites for a search engine? ...? Clarifying this would also clarify... - why should I trust you with my browsing data?

Good luck in any case - but a bit more info would be appreciated :-)

[ShaunMerritt]

Of course! Toucan aims to help you learn almost anything without asking you to take time out of your day to do it. We accomplish this by integrating learning moments into your browsing experience. Currently, we offer a few of these learning interactions:

- Inline translation: This technique is great for learning languages. It works by changing key words and phrases inline on any website - Hover for more: Highlights a word yellow and allows you to dive deeper into that word by hovering over it. For example if you chose that you wanted to learn about marketing, and Toucan saw `CPC` anywhere on the web, it would highlight it yellow and when hovered over, would provide extra context around what that is. - Microlecture moments: Small bits of knowledge around what you want to learn in your new tab page that provide an opportunity to dive deeper by providing helpful links that you could open to learn more if you'd like. - Quizzes: Quizzes based on what you're learning that show up occasionally in your new tab page.

We're continually building out new experiences and new ways of teaching, but this is the base that we offer currently. We measure our effectiveness as a teacher based on your responses to quiz questions, and interactions with content that Toucan has already shown before. We use science backed teaching techniques to ensure that we show you what you want to learn, when it would be most effective. Over time this will only get better, enabling you to learn more with even less effort. To learn more about some of the concepts that Toucan uses, please check out: https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/. We have a long way to go here, but internally we're all incredibly excited about this opportunity to integrate these learning techniques into your browsing experience.

The content that Toucan has currently is all made in house, however it will soon be possible for our users to create and share content.

We will monetize through premium content and offering a content marketplace for our users to both buy other peoples content, as well as monetize their own. We believe that this is beneficial to our users as well as Toucan. We will certainly use data to enhance the way users discover content on our marketplace, but this all remains internal and wouldn't go to any content creators. An example of this would be that Toucan recognizes you're watching a youtube video on how to make an iPhone app in Swift. Toucan also knows that there is a user uploaded piece of content in our marketplace that provides helpful microlectures, hover for mores, and quizzes on programming in Swift. We can use our data to know that at the end of that Youtube video would be a great time to suggest adding that particular piece of content to your account, even though it may cost $0.99. I really hope this helps clarify our intentions here. It's very early days, but the ability to create, and monetize content will be coming soon!

Thanks for the good luck! We're very excited for the journey ahead and incredibly appreciative of any and all feedback we can get along the way. I can assure you that all of the feedback/questions from this posting are being acted upon internally and will only make Toucan better as a result of all of you taking the time to post this feedback.