Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 84 posts

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#71

Post by alex_c »

The functionality looks very very cool. But the privacy policy raises an eyebrow - am I overreacting?

Usage Information. To help us understand how you use our Services and to help us improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, like the pages or other content you view, the searches you conduct, and the dates and times of your visits.

Desktop Activity on our Services. In order to provide the Services, we need to collect recordings of your desktop activity while using our Services, which may include audio and video screen recordings, your cookies, photos, local storage, search history, advertising interactions, and keystrokes.

Information from Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies. We and our third-party partners collect information using cookies, pixel tags, SDKs, or other tracking technologies. Our third-party partners, such as analytics partners, may use these technologies to collect information about your online activities over time and across different services.

[...]

How We Disclose the Information We Collect

Affiliates.We may disclose any information we receive to any current or future affiliates for any of the purposes described in this Privacy Policy.

Vendors and Service Providers. We may disclose any information we receive to vendors and service providers retained in connection with the provision of our Services.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#72

Post by wruza »

Honestly, the video feels like just any low/nocode tutorial video in a sense “that we’re going to automate something” and a minute later we are copying urls into some complex forms and following the voiceover of something you cannot grasp the meaning of. A little intro of what exactly we are doing would help.

I cold-watched only half of it, without reading any info on the project, but that’s how everyone does it, I guess.

But I get the idea. Automate by example with automatic scenario builder and fuzzy matching ui via ai.

As someone who works in automation, I (again, blindly) suggest looking into anti-detection and human behavior like mouse movements, typing errors and pauses, because that’s what your (and all ours) main enemy will be in the next decade.

All in all, this is in high demand, afaiu. I tend to use a classic ML approach for that (avoiding browser automation cause it obviously only works in a browser and limits/divides the area of application), but would love to try something that self-heals on site changes. Although I think I’d better use something that can detect changes and reconfigure my ML params rather than using it directly, cause I don’t really trust modern AI to free-float in runtime, and also costs.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#73

Post by alexirobbins »

alex_c wrote: post #71

The functionality looks very very cool. But the privacy policy raises an eyebrow - am I overreacting? Usage Information. To help us understand how you use our Services and to help us improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, like the pages or other content you view, the searches you conduct, and the dates and times of your visits. Desktop Activity on our Services. I…

We work with fortune 500 companies and have HIPAA compliant offerings, so we are very sensitive to privacy and security concerns. Fundamentally the models need to operate on whatever browser tasks users ask Autotab to perform, and we need to use frontier vision models like 4o and Claude to reliably perform them (model providers are the affiliates in question). If you have specific concerns happy to answer them.

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#75

Post by replwoacause »

abrichr wrote: post #74
replwoacause wrote: post #16

Looks nice. Anybody else in this space? This one is on the pricier end but I’m just a single user so maybe not the target customer

https://openadapt.ai is open source (MIT license).

Will give it a try thanks!

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#78

Post by angoragoats »

amarsharma wrote: post #46

Been working in this space for almost 9 years and written a lot of scrappers and web automations for various clients, I am really excited to build something like this too. Are you guys hiring? Would love to chat.

Warning: they want you to be in the office 6 days a week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40225546

Re: Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

#79

Post by alienallys »

alexirobbins wrote: post #73
alex_c wrote: post #71

The functionality looks very very cool. But the privacy policy raises an eyebrow - am I overreacting? Usage Information. To help us understand how you use our Services and to help us improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, like the pages or other content you view, the searches you conduct, and the dates and times of your visits. Desktop Activity on our Services. I…

We work with fortune 500 companies and have HIPAA compliant offerings, so we are very sensitive to privacy and security concerns. Fundamentally the models need to operate on whatever browser tasks users ask Autotab to perform, and we need to use frontier vision models like 4o and Claude to reliably perform them (model providers are the affiliates in question). If you have specific concerns happy to answer them.

Your response doesn't seem to address the Privacy concerns raised. Why is the policy so broad and invasive? There's no mention of how you handle PII data collected as telemetry.
Post reply on HN