Wednesday 23 November 2016

tech tip #35 - the dangers of autocomplete

Dear all,

Gordon has given me permission to use his recent example of accidentally sending an invitation to all senior faculty for his own calendar item as a “teachable moment”.

Very often when you are filling in a form or creating an event, your web browser (or in Gordon’s case his iPad) will “helpfully suggest” something to fill in. If you accept that option, you need to check that the suggestion is in fact  what you want. In Gordon’s case the iPad (in striving to be helpful!?) happened to suggest an event that had 19 invitees attached, including all senior faculty! When he accepted this choice it sent the invitation to all senior faculty and more! To prevent this from happening, you would need to either edit the event to remove all the invitees, or just not accept the suggestion.

Gordon’s particular example was specifically a result of how things work with Apple’s iOS. The option the iPad suggested for him was not actually what he wanted!



Michael Jackson MA (Cantab) MEDes (Calgary)
Science Teacher
Senior school Technology Coordinator
Senior School, St. Michaels University School
3400 Richmond Road | Victoria BC | V8P 4P5 | Canada
Phone: 250-370-6182 | Fax: 250-592-2812
Cell: 250-888-8783
Twitter: 
@MikeJ_SMUS
www.smus.ca
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