Technology

82581 readers

3598 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

324

Firefox's beta feature "Smart Window" shared browsing and search history to AI models without prompting (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 8 hours ago by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] XLE@piefed.social 79 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Relevant section:

Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.

You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.

Fine so far.

The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.

It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.

Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.

I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.

Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.

Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I'm willing to give them a pass since this was a development build and while someone probably should've thought of it, it's the kind of bug that can happen. If this was the public release it would be a lot more outrageous.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 11 points 5 hours ago

Finding out about this gives me some extra questions, though.

Was this data summarized on enabling this window, or before?
Did it use an existing model, or re-use one that someone may have already downloaded for a different feature?
Is this activity going anywhere else, like Mozilla's recent "privacy-preserving" advertising?
When this does release, what will the default be?

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

There’s also an option to bring your own LLM, with fields for model name, endpoint, and API token available for entry when the manual option is enabled. However, the page itself warns local models may not work correctly.

It looks like there's an option for people to self-host too. You won't have to send your history to someone else's computer.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 16 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

If it's anything like how they handled the AI sidebar, this option is going to get hidden before it hits production.

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

It would be really cool if they didn't do that this time.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 5 points 7 hours ago

Hey, I'm not excited about more stuff getting added into an already overflowing Firefox (why not an extension?!), but if they must promote AI choice, I'm with you: actually allow user choice.

(Based on how Mozilla has added two unrequested search engines while ignoring a request to add StartPage, the "choice" thing seems to boil down to backroom deals.)