
Toucan teaches you new skills while you browse the web - gczh
https://jointoucan.com/
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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?

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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](https://jointoucan.com/privacy-policy)

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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...](https://paste.q3k.org/paste/uj-
GbID4#g7IYwrXiF6zXlnlxQYguMlr1A8U3OyfwslJWCFyYQKd)

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...](https://paste.q3k.org/paste/gxklokkF#055mmZ9Qu-
zeiAwXGpWqSpwj+aHz0r16Bq3HUOsAOx5) , 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.

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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.

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malnourish
I get a mostly-empty page[0] on Win 10 with Firefox 76 and cookies blocked
from cdnjs.cloudlfare and js.stripe.

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/LHCYCCw.png](https://i.imgur.com/LHCYCCw.png)

~~~
lostinroutine
Yeah, there's something on the site that's being blocked by my ublock. Turning
it off revived the page for me.

Update: it's not ublock. Tried refreshing a few times with ublock enabled and
it works. I think it was just an unstable cdn somewhere

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ebg13
Maybe, but I'm getting random 404s on the js urls themselves without any
blocking.

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ShaunMerritt
Hey everyone! I'm Shaun Merritt, the Co-Founder and CTO of Toucan
(jointoucan.com). Happy to answer any questions that you have about our
product, and incredibly grateful for all the great feedback. I'll be jumping
into some of the comments too. Excited for you all to give it a try. :)

~~~
btcboss
What are you using to do translations?

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mowsmith
I installed it to try it out, but it takes over your new tab page which I
already have configured, so I just immediately uninstalled it. Maybe I didn't
read closely enough and it said it was going to do that, but clearly I missed
it and don't want that happening.

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ivanstojic
When I navigate to that page on my iOS device, all I see is a green upper bar
with a hamburger menu. Clicking on the menu offers "log in" and "add toucan"

I clicked back.

~~~
ShaunMerritt
Hi there! I'm so sorry you experienced that. We are currently optimized for
Chrome on desktop, but definitely should add a mobile warning about that on
our mobile landing page. The blank page is due to content blockers on iOS, and
we will be working to make sure that our site works with the most popular ad
blockers and browsers going forward to give you a better experience. I really
appreciate the feedback and detailed explanation here, this will help
tremendously as we continue to better Toucan.

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miguelmota
The home page is useless in describing the product. Please provide a demo gif
or video in the home page showing how it works.

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kiba
At first glance it isn't obvious what Toucan is meant to teach. Apparently, it
exposes you to contextual information on a given topic.

I am not sure that is how you teach "skills" or build declarative knowledge.

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aaron695
I think it's a real interesting idea and could work!

I got a little confused when I removed a pack and it stayed, but then I saw
remove -> removed.

Then I added a pack and went to a website to test and didn't see anything.

Soccer Hooliganism -> Wikipedia on soccer, couldn't see anything.

Because I was not totally sure what it does I wondered if it only works on
language. I assume it's just to learn about Soccer Hooliganism though.

(I haven't signed up, have approved access to sites, ublocker running)

[edit] Playing more - Difficulty, could go below Easy into the void on the tab

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exolymph
What I gathered from the website is that Toucan can swap in "comida" for
"food"; I can pretty well extrapolate the language-learning function from that
example. But, um, does it do anything else?

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choward
It probably sends your data to their server so you have the comfort of knowing
your browsing history is being backed up.

