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397

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

submitted 12 hours ago by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 89 points 11 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 33 points 9 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 15 points 9 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 23 points 11 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 19 points 10 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 10 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] XLE@piefed.social 6 points 10 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.)