Wow! I’ve always wanted a browser that would track everything about me! /s
Gotta get me some of that.
I appreciate him saying it upfront. Makes it easy to stay away from all of their products.
In other news, Perplexity has signed a deal with Motorola to have the browser preinstalled on their phones.
That’s like a cigarette brand marketing themselves as the most cancer-causing.
Before even reading the article, I’m thinking they’re maybe selling it as a good thing along the lines of “do you hate to see those ads you don’t care about? Taking space on your apps and pages? What if there was a way to make them actually useful! Make them feel like content, just for you!”
I feel like I have to point out that this is horrific either way
Edit: I actually talked about this quickly with a few almost tech-illiterate friends and they were honestly excited about that at first, when I didn’t preface it with my reasoned disdain for it or the privacy implications… so despite the way we here react to it, I’m almost sure this will sell amazingly.
P.T. Barnum in his grave getting a full on chubby for all the suckers that go for this shit
When using my current browser, any guess as to how often I’ve said to myself “I need a browser that spies on me more”?
Beep boop, this is your browser speaking. You have stated that you need a browser that spies on you more one (1) times.
And people would voluntarily use this browser …why?
This is really good information, now I know to avoid their browser like the plague.
I would like for the people, who come up with these ideas, to dogfood their own product. Actually force them to try their own medicine. It would be a single digit percentage of acceptance then
Where is the hacktivism when you need it? These companies need to be gutted from the inside out.
Begin, the AI wars have.
Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.
Believes it, or is just spinning it that way?
You could show me an ad for exactly what I want in that moment and I’d immediately not want it any more.
Enough already.
Hey, look for that browser to fail instantly as no one will use it.
Is Chrome not doing exactly this?
Chrome is relatively limited in scope compared to, say, a user on an instance of degoogled chromium just using the same Google services along with all the other browsing they do. The extra data that’s gathered is generally going to be things like a little more DNS query information, (assuming your device isn’t already set to default to Google’s DNS server) links you visit that don’t already have Google’s trackers on them (very few) and some general information like when you’re turning on your computer and Chrome is opening up.
The real difference is in how Chrome doesn’t protect you like other browsers do, and it thus makes more of the collection that Google’s services do indirectly, possible.
Perplexity is still being pretty vague here, but if I had to guess, it would essentially just be taking all the stuff that Google would usually get from tracking pixels and ad cookies, and baking that directly in to the browser instead of it relying on individual sites using it.
“Help us improve your User Experience by trying as hard as possible to induce to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need.”
Damn, and I really liked them too. It’s the most accurate LLM I’ve tried and it even accurately cites sources as well (unlike Copilot, which just makes shit up and then cites an unrelated source).
