You see it in our political class. Egregious thing? Nah, try this? Oh you're whining now? Here's some more. Look over here. What about this? Moar gnashing! And now this. Oh you don't like it? Clearly you hate children and freedom and family because this is all and only about protecting the children and saving everyone from rapists, Russians and whatever else the zeitgeist is afraid of.
It feels almost like "AI" can't be built without trillions of hours of human work, yet the ownership of the models and the resulting revenue goes only to those in positions of power to exploit that labor instead of the people doing actual work.
Apple Pay still does send a lot of telemetry about your payments though. https://duti.dev/randoms/wip-location-services/
so when I use the physical card that is also on Apple Pay, and Apple Pay tells me I just made a transaction as if I had used Apple Pay, that is all happening on my device? what online service is my phone using to track my account with Visa or my credit card issuer, and it's polling or push?
https://9to5google.com/2023/12/20/google-wallet-without-inte...
I called that bullshit, guess this article is just proving my point.
I do. Which is sometimes annoying if somebody else is looking at my screen.
Heck, most of them think the Internet is Chrome.
In the end Google has achieved something that Microsoft couldn't with Internet Explorer, and won the Browser Wars.
Google managed to aggressively advertise their browser by optional install "offer" within Windows installers of software. And they were aiming exactly at all those who couldn't tell the difference between the web browsers and who were conditioned by more experienced family members, friends etc. to just blindly click "Next Next, Finish". Thus, that was an easy win.
Being here when we had choice between Gecko, Presto, Trident and later WebKit/Blink makes me sad how easily the IT world allowed this nearly 100% monoculture to happen. There are still other browsers but chances that we return to variety and choice of rendering engines are low.
Wasn't that the entire point of Windows Recall as well?
Sheesh, I'm starting to notice a pattern...
(Edit: thinking about it, I think generic terms like "Internet Explorer" should not be trademarkable at all, also I just learned, that also Microsoft "stole" the name and had to pay in a settlement..)
Maybe I'm misremembering it. Google is awful. My goodness. I hate Android and can't wait to be rid of it. Graphene and it's buddies can't roll it fast enough
What you should've done is saved what they said so you could post it directly as evidence. If they're collecting all the data they can, you should naturally also have the right to do the same! I've noticed they're increasingly memory-holing a lot of things that, somewhat coincidentally, are inconvenient truths.
Does anyone believe a single big tech company isn’t harvesting data en masse from everyone in duplicitous manners?
Like, the best case scenario is that they don’t just blatantly steal your data and instead use dark patterns or inference to take from you without your knowledge.
And then, thanks to the wonderful opinions of the court, the government has full access to said data since you apparently knowingly agreed to giving it to a third party by virtue of the fact that you engaged in any sort of commerce.
It’s why I’m for forcing content being posted on the internet to be non anonymous and tied to a real identity.
The corporations and government already have and abuse all this data. I want the benefit of knowing when someone says “As an American {incredibly divisive shit}” that it’s actually someone in a foreign country sowing chaos for money or political aims.
That last question I don't even want to ask because the first two doesn't seem clear.
This could be simply fixed by adding the feature, and defaulting it off, and letting people learn about it and enable it.
That's not the goal. Turning your information into their information is the goal. If training an LLM on some data isn't copyright infringement but instead makes it a brand new non-derivative work, then training an LLM on your personal information arguably means it's no longer your personal information, but instead a legally distinct work.
Nobody gets a promotion for doing that.
If users' behaviors can be pre-labeled on their own devices, processed with AI, and then sent back, it might save a significant amount of internal computing costs.
https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-memories-history-journeys
A 4B model is not very useful for text generation, but useful for classification, so you're probably right.
But for it all to go to one place? That's a scary amount of data.
I do like how Firefox now has a "prevent future AI integrations" checkbox[0], but I just don't believe it anymore (i.e. that it won't magically `uncheck` itself and then enable features I've not requested/authorized).
Which is why I just used an LLM to help me create a local network admin rule to disable the update engine entirely (this SHOULD. NOT. BE. NECESSARY).
[•] <https://www.perplexity.ai/search/b0d3bf5d-7ac7-4d4c-b6c6-32b...>
[0] with a sick darkpattern (for most users to laregly ignore)
If Chrome starts sending data from the browser back to Google, that's going to be a huge compliance issue. If you work for a company that processes customer data in the browser, you're going to need to ban Chrome.
They don't record data (POSTs etc).
This seems to be what they're hedging against:
> Some AI features in Chrome do not rely on on-device Generative models, and those features may still run even if the on-device Generative AI models are removed.
the on-device ai just offloads some work onto your device
i doubt anyone will be banning chrome, for some reason "it's for ai" is a valid excuse for any amount of sillyness
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
They didn't alter the deal, you just stopped being as naive.
The motivation vectors exist here to ensure that, over time, Chrome behaves in ways the end user DOES NOT WANT.
(that they are an ad company (and they don't know what the implication is)).
Do I even need to ask?
I did some web searches and see Brave has its own AI thing “Leo” that is intended to preserve privacy. But I don’t think that is on device. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I use Firefox myself but have family and friends who use various Chromium based browsers.
Thank you.
If you have a beefy enough device, then yes this can be done on-device.
https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...
Packagers might eventually disable that but I tested this behaviour in chromium 148 a few hours ago, and it would download the weights but has trouble running them.
[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api#hardware-req...
The non-disclosure clauses in mass surveillance legislation will ensure the process is opaque to users.
You’ll only find out about it when your door is smashed down and all your devices are seized, because Chrome’s crappy 4GB AI model misinterpreted an innocent photo of your kid in a paddling pool.
It doesn't block ads. It clicks them first, and then blocks them.
I don't want websites to loose revenue because of my adnlocker. I want them to make extra money because of it!
I'm not affiliated, but would like the project to get more followers. This can stop ads once and for all.
You seem more knowledgeable in how browsers and js work than me. Does the below text still mean that AdNausem is downloading and running all the advertising JS?
Here's what's in the link: >AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions this is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads.
Or is it a case of too big too fail.
Seems like running governments' infrastructure pays off. No regulator will dare to impose a fine that could collapse the company. But this is very much needed.
£100bn fine and confiscation of assets in the given country could be a start.
I'm not trying to be mean here, but have you been frozen in ice for the last 20 years? This is effectively the tech industry's raison d'etre.
The "business" of so-called "tech" companies is all about data collection
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most...
it's more like knowledge extraction at this point. younger generations don't build up knowledge any more, everyone else is slowly losing their knowledge by not using it.
Eventually the rug pull comes and knowledge will only be accessible by those who can afford it.
Everyone knows that fines paid by companies (instead of the people making the decisions) are considered simply a cost of doing business. A probabilistic tax, if you will.
What finally dawned on me is that given they need more and more data to train bigger and bigger models, at some point the value of using my data for training will exceed the cost of getting caught using it without/against my consent.
There's no escape unless we change the law.
In the short term, maybe. That's what you tell investors.
In the long term, it's about altering, shaping, and even constructing reality: making a new and canonical truth for humanity where the ruling classes are invisible to us and the machine that tells us our history and bedtime stories and how we feel is in every device we carry, until it is everywhere, and it has always been everywhere, and it will always be everywhere.
Surveillance capitalism is so stupid.
I haven't ever considered it since and I assume many others are in the same boat.
Chrome has stayed incredibly sketchy from the beginning, when Google gained marketshare by sneaking Chrome into the installer for other products that people intentionally downloaded.
Then Chrome did things like "accidentally" uploading your entire browsing history to Google servers when you signed into Gmail.
Now they have declared war on ad blockers, despite the government warning that ad networks are too big a malware vector to ignore.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
They got Chrome when it was bundled with every single installer ever for about a decade (which was so prolific and scummy that Microsoft had to make the "default app" picker system more defensive, because Chrome was abusing it more than microsoft apps were).
When you installed Java, you also got Chrome set as your default browser with no interaction.
Or they one click downloaded it from Google.com because of a giant banner saying "You gotta download chrome"
It's insane to me how rarely people on HN seem to actually know the history of this. Everyone who worked in tech support in the 2010s experienced this.
It was an identical strategy that most spyware and adware used at the time.
2. The adblocking is preconfigured, and non technical users trying to find the right extensions has a very bad history of unintentional malware. Ad block? Adblock plus? Ublock? Ublock origin? This is a great example of what floors a lot of technical folk who would be "why not just install ublock origin" and fail to understand the "why should I when I can just get Brave one and it works"
3. Most people don't use macs
Brave is the Google empire aka chromium.
I use thorium, which also belongs to the empire, so it is not really any different to Brave - but I can use ublock origin still, so that's better. I think we are all in the Google empire here. Praising Brave as alternative, simply does not make a whole lot of sense really.
Firefox is a bit outside of it but it basically got rid of most of its users. When I use firefox, I can not play audio on youtube videos. It works fine with thorium. I tried to convince the firefox developer who said everyone on Linux must use pulseaudio (I don't) but there is no reasoning with Mozilla hackers here. He thinks he knows better than everyone else does. (I could recompile firefox from source, but Mozilla uses mozconfig still: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox... - they are too incompetent to transition into meson or cmake. A failing project, no wonder it lost most of its users. Titanic got nothing on the Firefox team.)
Unfortunately, there is no way to switch back to the stock Chromium look.
The single affiliated link scandal is enough to not touch that project with a ten foot pole.
The web's dependency on Chromium engines is deeply concerning, I agree. I used Firefox for a long time. But at this point, IMO Brave is the most pragmatic choice if you want a browser that's not Google but "just works" with the modern web.
Bubble indeed. No one should use Brave.
O no they gave you BAT for visiting websites. Ahhh crypto everyone run!
You’re the product, not the browser.
Witch true/false Commie true/false Possible customer true/false
Here is the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930833
AdNauseam not loading the response to the "click" request makes it trivially easy to flag as fraudulent, because a real click would load and run the response.
Another reply pointed out that AdNauseam just makes an http request to simulate a "click" and throws away the response. A real click would load and execute the response so it's trivially easy for ad networks to detect AdNauseam "clicks".
My ISP also already sees the servers I connect to, so DNS gives them less additional information than it does to buttflare.
Also hilarious that I got downvoted on my main comment but nobody was willing to show themselves.
While consumers remain surprised by affiliate clauses, the QC problem is considerably different from marketing against those recordings.
The linked article veers into Alexa for the ads part and says, roughly, must not be tin foil hats if everyone believes it – then explains the psychology misleading people in most cases. The "I'm noticing a pattern" thing…
Are there sources where Apple either acknowledges or even settles claims of advertising against secret Siri recordings?
Yes, advertising and selling data to third parties.
> In January 2025, Apple settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of current or former owners or purchasers of a Siri-enabled device, specifically: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch or Apple TV, whose confidential or private communications were allegedly obtained by Apple and/or shared with third parties as a result of an unintended Siri activation. (https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/apple-settlement-95-million-...)
And also https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...
They've also ignored people's explicit requests to not be tracked (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)
They've allowed third party contractors to listen to apple customers fucking (and who know what they did with those recordings). Apple's privacy policy says that they'll share (which includes selling) your data with "Apple-affiliated companies" and "our partners" without disclosing any of them.
I've seen claims that they've sold user data to facebook, but I haven't seen any details except the existence of "user-data sharing agreements" between apple and facebook and of course they take millions in cash to hand apple user's data over to google through their search engine.
Apple has been careless about handing data over in response to legal requests (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-facebo...) and gives a ton of user data to governments in the US and china. According to Snowden Apple partnered with the NSA as a data provider. Apple denied that. They've also denied working with the US government on DROPOUTJEEP.
They honestly don't have a very good track record when it comes to privacy, they're just quieter and less overtly evil about it than Google, MS, and facebook.
Zen has other issues for me on Ubuntu (eating a ton of resources) which is why I usually use FF. But I put Zen in a different category from Brave and definitely better than Chrome.
Still sketchy because of the lack of consent, but people act like Brave personally stole money from them.
The other "sketchy crypto stuff" is one of the few actually workable alternatives to funding websites with ads on webpages. Again, Brave took in no money (BAT) that you as an admin / creator would have otherwise had, and they keep it in escrow, they don't claim it.
The only other sketchy thing I can remember is pre-installing a deactivated VPN so that people could pay, push a button and it'd work immediately. Plenty of companies do hacks like that for the sake of UX. Dropbox used to hack macOS its Accessibility permission so people wouldn't have to dive into settings to toggle certain things.
The irony is that Firefox has had their own scandals like surreptitiously installing a hidden ad extension that would advertise for Mr. Robot, but somehow Firefox stans have erased that kerfuffle from their collective memory.
That isn't what it did.
They're now on a T480, released 2018.
What things? Looks like an urban myth.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
1) Google properties
1a) Chromecast
2) a few web-based games that were really pushing the envelope on web APIs and didn't bother testing on Firefox
3) WebUSB, commonly used for some things like keyboard customization apps
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
I believe SUSE, Red Hat don't harvest users data en masse.
It also kind of stinks because not every mistake should be immortalized and recorded forever. Blackmail and all that. It kind of ruins the internet in a different way.
We get all the negatives of anonymity now with foreign actors, domestic actors, and bots flooding the zone with lies, and not of the benefits since all the corporations and governments can trivially pierce that veil.
One uni in my country has been getting bomb threats during the exam period every year for multiple years (a random article says 20 times at least). The whole place gets evacuated each time, nothing is found and nobody is caught.
But people who think they're anonymous because they used a different nick? Yeah, those are idiots, their ISP and the platform knows who they are and anybody can deanonymize them through stylometry.
I don't think surveillance is the solution though. I'd much rather see a network of trust or (second best) anonymous proof of identity.
Any place selling alcohol or cigarettes is able to check if you're 18. They could just as easily check your nationality by looking at your ID and give you a crypto key which can be used to prove that to online platforms without revealing who you are.
But there's no money for big corps in that and most people are not even smart enough to think of it.
... or just hiding behind a VPN that exits there?
TSMC, maybe?
Perhaps Cory Doctorow will come up with a better term?
(Work at Mozilla, but not related to this - this is just public info.)
This conclusion doesn't follow your premise. Google has to pay because if Mozilla dies, so does the claim of any real competition on the browser engine market. So everyone agrees Firefox's engine is truly independent. Google pays so Firefox users don't use anything that has to do with Google.
If you think about it, the only real way to not hurt Google is for Firefox to stop existing. Chrome would end up being spun off from Google.
You mean, with reasonable administrations, caring for antitrust laws.
Safari is probably the only one?
The software companies, for whatever reason, have been largely bad actors when it comes to dealing with users data
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
I can think of just one, USB.
Chrome was built on the premise that web standards matter. Remember IE 6?
I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.
Even if NSA captured and logged all internet traffic, they'd still only get a fraction of the information within without breaking all the encryption.
And even if they could break the crypto, the ability would only have any power if/when they acted on it. Which in turns reveals the capability to both normal people and other nation states.
The limitations aren't laws, it's the practical consequences.
Of course, having laws with actual teeth helps.
So they use it when they feel like and not willy nilly? That doesnt change my perspective. They still have the ability to do it at will.
The Prompt API is part of a real W3C standard: https://www.w3.org/2025/03/webmachinelearning-charter.html
It's not even chaired by Google. It's Intel, believe it or not.
No, when they can get away with it. When the pros for them outweigh the cons. And every person affects that calculation in some small way - by their tolerance to injustice, by their outspokenness, by their ability to detect it, by the probability of an employee becoming a whistleblower and even by people's willingness to punish bad actors extra-legally.
> They still have the ability to do it at will.
Yes and your neighbor has the ability to wait on your doorstep until you open and then slit your throat.
He generally doesn't because of internal safeguards (humans have evolved emotions like remorse, though not all of them feel it - see psychopathy/ASPD for details) and external safeguards (the state generally opposes people infringing its monopoly on violence but in the absence of a state, he would still risk being hunted down and tortured/killed as punishment by your relatives and friends).
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I get what you're saying and I oppose dragnet surveillance but seeing things in pure black and white does not help.