Technology

Much like Adobe‘s Acrobat which I also have to use for work. At least from what I can tell when it suddenly summarizes a PDF. There‘s no way in hell that happens locally. But the fact that it seemingly automatically processes potentially sensitive data from customers didn‘t even do as little as raising eyebrows when I brought it up.

You can opt out in the settings

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.

The speed at which firefox has been enshittified is as impressive as it is sad.

F*** I really dont want to change away from Firefox. Pleas be good Firefox. Please! Don't F this up.

Waterfox. Librewolf. Zen. Floorp.

They're all good options in their own ways. Just pick one and go

This is so silly to be outraged about when there's literally a kill switch to kill it all right in settings.

So I feel violated and gross and I never wanna use Firefox again. I don't care if you can self host it. I don't care if it's private. Mozilla propagandists need to fucking understand that their privacy policy does not reassure me. Nor does the fact that they went back on the AI kill switch and sent my information that should've been private to someone else's computer a good thing. It is fucking bad and I hope Mozilla fucking implodes. In the rise of fascist governments and the need for privacy. This is unacceptable and I refuse to even use a third party fork of Firefox. The best feature arguably that made Firefox worth while that being syncing has been basically weaponized potentially into something evil that will be used against people. Especially as they have long since updated their policies to make sure law enforcement can gain access to your personal information anyway. I will switch to Vivaldi. Something that doesn't have money issues and makes ad revenue through search engine deals that aren't Google and Bing. Something that will sync my browser data end to end encrypted where they cannot fucking see it. Truly go fuck Mozilla.

There's a master "kill switch" for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who's concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.

Glad I turned that shit off right away.

Just let them shoot themselves in the foot. Get familiar with the forks. Someone at Mozilla has no idea what they're doing. You would think they would learn their lesson last AI garbage but I guess not.

No thanks.

One would think they'd be extra careful not to piss the users off at this point... but no.

They can't help themselves.