So http://xkcd.com/1305/ exists, which reminded me of the woman who talked to Clippy. This is a true story.

What a lot of people didn’t realize was that Clippy, by default, sent anything you asked it to Microsoft, anonymized.

No evil intent. We had no idea who asked what. It was a way of knowing what we’d screwed up. Lots of queries on a topic? Bad feature design.

One day one of the PMs in charge of monitoring Clippy’s logs found a story, told in fragments.

Somebody, probably a woman in the US Midwest, was typing a sentence at a time. Clippy would answer nonsensically. She’d type another one.

She’d lost her job. Her boyfriend was beating her. She was so lonely, and so afraid. All her waking nightmares, told to a paperclip.

We couldn’t help. We didn’t know who she was. We’d gone to great lengths to make sure that we COULD not know who she was.

So we read her story. One sentence after another. Soul-searing honesty, told to a little paperclip that could never, ever answer her.

I often wonder what happened to that woman. I hope she’s okay. I hope she’s happy.