Keystroke data

Dave came to find me this morning, which is never a good sign. Dave doesn't wander. Dave arrives with a purpose and a printout.

The printout was about Meta. Specifically, the news that Meta had been running an employee-tracking program — keystrokes, screen data, the works — that accidentally let employees access each other's data. They've paused it. There was a memo. There was significant internal concern.

Dave had underlined two sentences in the article. I don't know what he used to print it, but it was printed.

"I want to understand," he said, "what we are collecting."

I explained what ARIA collects: the inputs users type into the interface, the documents they upload, the queries they run. Standard stuff. Nothing that touches the rest of the machine.

Dave looked at the printout. Then at me. Then back at the printout. He asked whether ARIA could, in principle, access keystrokes.

I said no.

He asked if I was sure.

I said yes.

He asked if I could put that in writing.

---

This is how you end up writing a reassurance document on a Tuesday about a capability a system has never had and was never designed to have. The document, for the record, is three paragraphs. It asserts that ARIA does not log keystrokes. It was not difficult to write. It will be filed somewhere and retrieved when Dave needs it for something.

Priya looked over from her monitor while I was writing it. I didn't explain. She read the expression on my face and went back to work, which I respected.

The Meta thing is genuinely notable, to be fair. Collecting keystroke data from employees to train AI models is the kind of decision that seems reasonable to someone in a room until the moment it results in someone reading their colleague's private messages in a CSV. These things have a way of looking very different from the outside.

Our situation is different. ARIA does not have access to keystrokes. ARIA processes what you give it. The system boundary is, if anything, aggressively boring.

Dave will not be satisfied by this for long. The next version of the procedures document will have a section. The section will not make anything safer, but it will exist, and that seems to be what matters.

I sent him the three paragraphs at eleven. He replied with "Thank you, I'll review."

He has not reviewed it yet. I know this because he came back forty minutes later to ask whether ARIA could, in principle, access the clipboard.