this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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I guess the pdfs will be processed by google on their servers. I honestly dont want that. Is there a source?
I doubt that. There is no technical reason for that. OCR isn't that hard computationally. And from a privacy/GDPR perspective this seems like a legal mess not even google would take on.
The article states:
The author of the article only speculates:
Setting aside the question of privacy, this is a very nice feature. I do worry how Firefox will compete with many of these small comforts and if it may eventually fall out of favor as a viable mainstream alternative and there goes our chance at having a privacy respecting browser. I guess (hope?) there will always be a niche alternative for privacy-minded folks?
But as far as privacy I'm not sure how the scanning of PDFs will affect it. I mean everything on the internet is basically already scanned and cataloged and sharing information over public internet through PDF rather that HTML shouldn't make a difference? Unless the article means Chrome browser would be scanning private files opened through the user's computer.
The big companies at least will make using their products awful experience if you value your time, sanity, privacy or just about anything at all. Its unfortunate though how many people seem to be content in watching almost nothing but ads and maybe some other content occasionally. Those types of users will probably keep using whatever was presented to them first.
Yeah, if I run my own business and have my own email servers behind a VPN, no way in hell PDFs on that server are being indexed.
But now, if an employee opens a PDF in an email attachment and the file is sent out to Google's severs for OCR processing?? That's a huge breach of security.
We should be able to expect that what we open in our web browsers stays local.