Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browser.
This official Terms of Use will, Mozilla argues, offer users ‘more transparency’ over their ‘rights and permissions’ as they use Firefox to browse the information superhighway — as well well as Mozilla’s “rights” to help them do it, as this excerpt makes clear:
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice (aka privacy policy). This adds a crop of cushy caveats to cover the company’s planned AI chatbot integrations, cloud-based service features, and more ads and sponsored content on Firefox New Tab page.
The problem is the inclusion of the feature to begin with. It should be an opt in add install.
I agree to a point, but I look at this similar to how I’d view any feature in a browser. Sometimes there are features added that I don’t use, and thus, I simply won’t use them.
This would be a problem for me if it was an “assistant” that automatically popped up over pages I was on to offer “help,” but it’s not. It’s just a sidebar you can click a button in the menu to pop out, or you can never click that button and you’ll never have to look at it.
It’s not a feature that auto-enables in a way that actually starts sending data to any AI company, it’s just an optional interface, that you have to click a specific button to open, that can then interface with a given AI model if you choose to use it. If you don’t want to use it, then you ideally won’t even see it open during your use of Firefox.
Please let them not ruin Firefox with some bullshit AI. I can’t take much more of this, Firefox is one of the last things I have left.
It’s two things:
If you don’t want it, they don’t seem to be pushing it any further than that. Just don’t click the option in the menus and you’ll be fine. (I believe you can also fully disable the option from appearing in settings too)
Yes, I gathered that from the previous comment, but thank you for the additional info.
I just hope it doesn’t progress further in the future. AI is quite possibly a more catastrophic technological development than nuclear weapons.
I wouldn’t go that far. A technology that wastes a lot of energy and creates a lot of bad quality content isn’t the same as a bomb that directly kills millions.
Until the tech bros let an AI manage nuclear weapons because “cost savings”
But nuclear weapons have only been used twice in 80 years for military purposes. They have arguably prevented more deaths than they have caused.
And you’re drastically underselling the potential impact of AI. If anything, your reaction is a defense mechanism because you can’t bear to stomach the potential consequences of AI.
One could have easily reacted the same way to the invention of the printing press, or the automobile, or the analog computer. They all wasted a lot of energy for limited benefit, at first. But if the technology develops enough, it can destroy everything that we hold dear.
Human beings engineering their own obsolescence while cavalierly disregarding the potential consequences. A tale as old as time
Nukes only “prevent” deaths by saying they’ll cause drastically large numbers of deaths otherwise. If the nukes didn’t exist, there wouldn’t then be the threat of death from the nukes, which is being prevented by more people having the nukes.
“AI” is just more modern machine learning techniques that we’ve had for decades. Most implementations of it today are things that nobody actually wants, producing worse quality outputs than that of a human. Maybe it will automate some jobs, sure, that can happen. Just like how tons of automation historically has just pushed people from direct labor to management of machine labor.
Heck, if “AI” automated most of the work people did and put us out of a job, that would just accelerate our progress towards pushing for UBI/or an era of superabundance, which I’d welcome with open arms. It’s a lot easier to convince people that centralized ownership of wealth and resources makes no sense if goods can be produced automatically by machines for free.
But sure, seeing matrix multiplication causing statistically probable sentences to be formed really has me unable to stomach the potential consequences. /s
And what did the printing press, automobile, and analog computer bring?
A rapid advancement in the spread of information and local news, faster individualized transport that later contributed to additional developments to rail and bus transit solutions, and software solutions that can massively reduce workloads while accelerating human progress.
And all of those things either raised the standard of living without causing equivalent harm from job loss, or actively created substantially more jobs.
Make human work obsolete so we can do what we care about and hang out with people we like instead of spending our days doing labor to produce goods we rely on? Sign me up.
Okay? But war existed long before nuclear weapons, and it also causes a large number of deaths. If nukes didn’t exist, there would potentially be more wars, and thus more death.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We have already automated essentially everything else, and yet people work more than ever. If goods can be produced automatically by machines for free, what’s to stop the owners of the machines from simply eliminating what used to be the working class?
Your defensiveness speaks volumes.
An ever more powerful nucleus of mechanization that has resulted in the most devastating wars and the most widespread suffering in all of human history. Genocides, chattel slavery, famine, biochemical and nuclear weapons; mass extinction and the imminent destruction of the very planet on which we live.
Sweet summer child. Making human work obsolete makes human beings obsolete. I envy your naivety.
NOOOOOOO AI BAD ALL THE TIME THERE ARE NO CONCEIVABLE USE CASES FOR AI ITS ALL SLOP NOOOOOOO
Correct 😎
Give an example, a first-person example, where it is not slop.
as a glorified search engine, after pretty much all search indexes were neutered on purpose…but even then it’s…mostly passable, but always untrustworthy.
Ok but it kinda is though