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

Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 261 posts

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#251

Post by lovich »

bell-cot wrote: post #226
lovich wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I said big tech I meant software, not primarily hardware companies. ASML is also not likely to be harvesting our data.

Beyond the easy quip, my point was that "big tech" has taken on a far-too-narrow meaning. I'd bet you didn't really mean "software" either - you were, in effect, referring to the whole amoral (at best) ecosystem of companies which run social media and related web sites and data infrastructure, making their money through addiction, exploitation, and extraction. Perhaps Cory Doctorow will come up with a better term?

No, I meant companies that have a lot of money and are primarily software. Discord for example is a company that isnt as big as a faang but one of the companies I would have included in "big tech",

The software companies, for whatever reason, have been largely bad actors when it comes to dealing with users data

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#252

Post by dingaling »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #231
account42 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has a well paying tech job. Many have to use their devices until they literally die and many more choose to do so because getting a newer device would mean having to deal with the bullshit of newer software.

I have family on fixed incomes. They don't use 15 year old computers. They simply don't last that long.

I've just 'upgraded' a friend who was using a ThinkPad T410, released Jan 2010. So sixteen years. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it except it was capped at 8GB RAM and chugged along slowly.

They're now on a T480, released 2018.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#253

Post by fithisux »

suburban_strike wrote: post #248
ZetsuBouKyo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the current shortage of computing power and electricity, I suspect that what they really want is not your data, but the computing power and electricity from your device. If users' behaviors can be pre-labeled on their own devices, processed with AI, and then sent back, it might save a significant amount of internal computing costs.

Chrome does/did this already. They've never been of any forensic interest to me but the history file stores clusters of domains visited and keywords searched for. It was pitched as user "Journeys." I think they've deprecated it. https://chromeunboxed.com/chrome-memories-history-journeys A 4B model is not very useful for text generation, but useful for classification, so you're probably right.

Yes, it is useful for the next wave of eitch hunting

Witch true/false Commie true/false Possible customer true/false

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#254

Post by autoexec »

Terretta wrote: post #230
bigyabai wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Siri, for that matter? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla... Sheesh, I'm starting to notice a pattern...

Every vendor tripped over the third party affiliate human review issue. While consumers remain surprised by affiliate clauses, the QC problem is considerably different from marketing against those recordings. The linked article veers into Alexa for the ads part and says, roughly, must not be tin foil hats if everyone believes it – then explains the psychology misleading people in most cases. The "I'm noticing a patte…

> Are there sources where Apple either acknowledges or even settles claims of advertising against secret Siri recordings?

Yes, advertising and selling data to third parties.

> In January 2025, Apple settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of current or former owners or purchasers of a Siri-enabled device, specifically: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch or Apple TV, whose confidential or private communications were allegedly obtained by Apple and/or shared with third parties as a result of an unintended Siri activation. (https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/apple-settlement-95-million-...)

And also https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...

They've also ignored people's explicit requests to not be tracked (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)

They've allowed third party contractors to listen to apple customers fucking (and who know what they did with those recordings). Apple's privacy policy says that they'll share (which includes selling) your data with "Apple-affiliated companies" and "our partners" without disclosing any of them.

I've seen claims that they've sold user data to facebook, but I haven't seen any details except the existence of "user-data sharing agreements" between apple and facebook and of course they take millions in cash to hand apple user's data over to google through their search engine.

Apple has been careless about handing data over in response to legal requests (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-facebo...) and gives a ton of user data to governments in the US and china. According to Snowden Apple partnered with the NSA as a data provider. Apple denied that. They've also denied working with the US government on DROPOUTJEEP.

They honestly don't have a very good track record when it comes to privacy, they're just quieter and less overtly evil about it than Google, MS, and facebook.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#255

Post by AVocaloidFaN »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #233
therein wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand c…

It sounds like Firefox needs to implement hardware assisted AV1? I don't see how you can plausibly blame anyone but Mozilla for this.

Firefox has had AV1 HW decode for years.

I wonder if he's using a Radeon gpu, those have had issues like video playback making the entire ui framerate drop. But it happens in steam/electron too, not only firefox. The shader cores aren't used much either, it's just a bug.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#256

Post by amatecha »

dingaling wrote: post #252
StilesCrisis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have family on fixed incomes. They don't use 15 year old computers. They simply don't last that long.

I've just 'upgraded' a friend who was using a ThinkPad T410, released Jan 2010. So sixteen years. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it except it was capped at 8GB RAM and chugged along slowly. They're now on a T480, released 2018.

Yeah I was daily-driving a 2012 machine (X230) until 2024, when I then switched to a 2018 ThinkPad which I'm still using.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#257

Post by niutech »

lovich wrote: post #162
2ndorderthought wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called this out when it was announced on here. Supposedly the team lead replied to my comment saying this wouldn't happen. I rolled my eyes but asked will android be able to use those models for ex filtration. No reply. And apparently the original claim was not true either lol. Maybe I'm misremembering it. Google is awful. My goodness. I hate Android and can't wait to be rid of it. Graphene and it's buddies can't r…

They’re all awful. Does anyone believe a single big tech company isn’t harvesting data en masse from everyone in duplicitous manners? Like, the best case scenario is that they don’t just blatantly steal your data and instead use dark patterns or inference to take from you without your knowledge. And then, thanks to the wonderful opinions of the court, the government has full access to said data since you apparently k…

> Does anyone believe a single big tech company isn’t harvesting data en masse from everyone in duplicitous manners?

I believe SUSE, Red Hat don't harvest users data en masse.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#258

Post by niutech »

account42 wrote: post #222
hparadiz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Ungoogled) Chromium and Firefox are both projects that are open source and readily available. The code is sitting there ready for you to compile. More users = more donations. You can be the change you wanna see.

Neither will accept pull requests that remove the tracking wanted by the corporate overlord.

Ungoogled Chromium doesn't include any tracking by Google and there are privacy-friendly Firefox forks: LibreWolf and Mullvad Browser.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#259

Post by niutech »

janalsncm wrote: post #98
xacky wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that Mozilla has admitted they can't survive without Google's revenue. You are basically using Google by proxy unless you use a truly independent browser engine of they get blocked by Cloudflare for not having enough fingerprinting tech.

What browser can genuinely claim independence from Google? Chromium browsers are all arguably in the same camp. If FF is implicated, then so are forks like Zen. Safari is probably the only one?

There are more: Epiphany (GNOME Web), Ultralight, Servo, Ladybird, Ekioh Flow.

Re: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

#260

Post by niutech »

fragmede wrote: post #118
GeekyBear wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brave started off incredibly sketchy Chrome has stayed incredibly sketchy from the beginning, when Google gained marketshare by sneaking Chrome into the installer for other products that people intentionally downloaded. Then Chrome did things like "accidentally" uploading your entire browsing history to Google servers when you signed into Gmail. Now they have declared war on ad blockers, despite the government warn…

That's a different kind of sketchy than whatever crypto ad replacement stuff that Brave was accused of doing.

This was back in 2020 and they pardoned for it, it's time to give Brave another chance!
Post reply on HN