If the product is free, you are the product.
8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
211–220 of 261 posts
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#212Note that this is a pretty blatant GDPR violation and you should report this to the local data protection agency if you are a EU resident and care about this (especially if you've used this extension). Their privacy policy claims the data collection is consent-based and that the app settings also let you revoke this consent. According to the article, the latter isn't the case and the user is never informed of the ext…
They're probably only incorporated in the US, so it's meaningless. If they plan to establish a corp in the EU they'll just put it in Ireland and bribe Ireland like all of US big tech does. This is a solved thing.
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#213[flagged]
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#214I stick to extensions that Mozilla has manually vetted as part of the Firefox recommended extensions program. > Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts. https://support.mozi…
The article says the extension has been "manually reviewed" by Google.
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#215“ A few weeks ago, I was wrestling with a major life decision. Like I've grown used to doing, I opened Claude” Is this where we’re at with AI?
Some people are incapable of internal thought. They have to verbalise/write down their thoughts, so they can hear/read it back, and that's how they make progress. In a way, these people's brain do work like LLMs.
There is no evidence whatsoever that having or not having inner monologue confers any advantages or disadvantages.
For all we know, it's just two paths the brain can take to arrive at the same destination.
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#216Why would one expect privacy with a vpn? That too a free one? With the web all traffic is encrypted point to point, which means individual sites could compromise your privacy but there is no single funnel to lose all your data. VPN is exactly that! All data goes through a single funnel and they can target anything they want
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#217Why would one expect privacy with a vpn? That too a free one? With the web all traffic is encrypted point to point, which means individual sites could compromise your privacy but there is no single funnel to lose all your data. VPN is exactly that! All data goes through a single funnel and they can target anything they want
Because VPNs are exclusively and heavily marketed and sold as magical turnkey solutions to privacy, encryption, hair loss, and more!
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people are incapable of internal thought. They have to verbalise/write down their thoughts, so they can hear/read it back, and that's how they make progress. In a way, these people's brain do work like LLMs.
There is no evidence whatsoever that having or not having inner monologue confers any advantages or disadvantages. For all we know, it's just two paths the brain can take to arrive at the same destination.
The comment (at least my reading of it) did not cast any judgement on whether this was a good or bad thing.
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#219Google needs to act on removing these extensions/doing more thorough code reviews. Reputability is everything, and they can be actually valuable (e.g. LastPass, my own extension Ward) There has to be a better system. Maybe a public extension safety directory?
I’m not sure there’s much more juice to squeeze here via automated or semi-automated means. They could perhaps be doing these kind of human-in-the-loop reviews themselves for all extensions that hit a certain install count, but that’s not a popular technique at Google.
Chrome extension codebases are fairly basic, I think there's room to build an agentic code scanner for these, but the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze to justify for them $$$-wise. Manual reviews I agree are expensive and dicey.
Re: 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is most codebase are huge - millions of lines when you include all the libraries etc. Often they're compiled with typescript etc making manual review almost impossible. And if you demand the developer send in the raw uncompiled stuff you have the difficulty of Google/Mozilla having to figure out how to compile an arbitrary project which could use custom compilers or compilation steps. Remember that someon…
For example, the following hidden anywhere in the codebase allows arbitrary code execution even under the most stringent JavaScript security policy (no eval etc): I=c=>c.map?c[0]?c.reduce((a,b)=>a[b=I(b)]||a(b),self):c[1]:c (How it works is an exercise to the reader) The actual code to run can be delivered as an innocuous looking JavaScript array from some server, and potentially only delivered to one high value targ…
Isn’t minified code banned from chrome extensions?