this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.
This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.
It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.
Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.
We actually do have better terminology for "local to Mozilla" and "remote to Mozilla"... It's first party and third party.
And, from the looks of it, Mozilla is indeed using Google Cloud Services as a third party, according to their privacy policy.
That’s a given. Google Cloud Platform is managed through the same Google Cloud Console as everything else, which is in Google’s datacenter, even when it it’s running locally - unless you opt for an air-gapped option. It’s how companies can make data locality claims while using the same tools and one of the selling points pushed by cloud services.
Local to them isn't what is meant when an AI is claimed to be local. OpenAI could claim ChatGPT is local by the same logic. It's still not locally hosted by the established definition, and neither is Mozilla's.