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Mozilla launches privacy friendly AI addon called "Orbit" (connect.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/technology

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that's on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.

I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!

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[–] zecg 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism?

Yes, their "privacy friendly ad measurement" that's opt out is a faux pas that I just can't forgive. I used to donate to the fuckers.

[–] zkfcfbzr 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That feature (more) they've been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

I don't think that whether it has a privacy impact even matters. What matters is how it demonstrates Mozilla's attitude towards user consent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It does not affect you if you use an adblocker, this feature is meant to allow websites to have ad analytics without tracking.

[–] zecg 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

User JohnFen on ycombinator's hacker news said it nicely and I'm lazy, so:

PPA means that my browser is doing the spying instead of a third party directly. That's certainly a privacy improvement, but I don't consider it sufficient.

"Sufficiently private" is a subjective call. I don't want to be spied on. Whether or not there are technological "privacy preserving" features baked into it doesn't alter that fundamental fact.

All that said, this isn't a bad enough move to get me to stop using Firefox, as long as I can keep it disabled. It does mean that I have to view Firefox with suspicion, though. I can't consider the browser to be my "user agent" anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Well, since you copy-pasted, i will likewise share my favorite take on thr situation.

After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies.

As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take), or "It's a pointless feature that's doomed to failure because it'll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it'll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies" (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.

I'm absolutely convinced there's a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.