I’ve got it now.
I was messing up vas-tu and tu vas…and how to properly phrase questions in French. Duolingo helped me on that.
But Duolingo’s also been sloppy, and now my email address and some other pertinent information about me – Heather the human – is “out there.”
Yet again.
To be fair, I’ve been online for a very long time; you could probably find my email address in a few places. But, still, we use email addresses for login username (mandated by most sites).
Lean into this – I trusted a service provider with that info – privately. And now it’s clearly not private.
There’s a technique called screen scraping – a programatic grab of all of the information on a website. Not difficult. If there’s sensitive info in that grab, well…
I joked yesterday that Duolingo users, upon learning about this, all began to curse in their new language(s).
So what can you do/learn from this as a Duolingo user:
🦉Revisit how you log in. Federated? (Coupled to another account, like Google). Directly?
🦉Change your Duolingo password? It’ll make you feel better and is a positive action if that password hadn’t been changed in a while. No, it won’t stop screen scraping.
🦉Understand the level of trust we put any login. That should be its own blog post.
🦉Back to the concept of federated login. Make a mental project and then maybe a real one to know how you log in everywhere. A whole lot of accounts get left hanging (open) and never used again, and those are unnecessary security risks. The project then is to shut down accounts you don’t use. Yes, this is advanced. (I’m not perfect at this either). Duolingo might be “one of those dormant accounts.”
Dormant. Dormir – to sleep. Zzzzzzz.
🦉🦉🦉
(Who let the owls out…who who who who). (I’m old…and a hoot).
