In other news, Perplexity has signed a deal with Motorola to have the browser preinstalled on their phones.
I appreciate him saying it upfront. Makes it easy to stay away from all of their products.
Companies are so removed from what users want, they only focus on what shareholders want to hear and don’t consider that users will hate it.
Because there is legal precedent that says shareholders come first.
You can blame Dodge for this. Yes, that Dodge.
But then users use it anyway for some reason. Many people care so little.
Attention is invisible until you take the time to acknowledge it. People will never treat it as a resource of the same value as these companies, because they don’t even recognize it as something being taken away from them (despite that it is actually the most precious resource - our literal lives), and that disparity will always be profitable.
Most people are unintelligent sacks of meat, not much critical thought about what they do runs through their minds.
It is legislation’s work.
That’s like a cigarette brand marketing themselves as the most cancer-causing.
Oh yeah I’m definitely going to use that. He’s a marketing genius.
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.
6?
Is Chrome not doing exactly this?
Chrome doesn’t really collect much data directly. It just has no protection against all the trackers on nearly every website that do.
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.
And people would voluntarily use this browser …why?
Weirder things have happened. Like people using Brave voluntarily.
I’m out of the loop, what’s wrong with Brave?
It’s a great browser especially if you go through the settings and disable the things you don’t need, but the people here don’t like it because the CEO donated $1000 to anti gay marriage bill in 2008. There were some other controversies like injecting brave’s referral codes on crypto exchanges if you were signing up for an account and allowing bat donations to creators that didn’t sign up for it but all of that has been remedied.
You make it sound like the CEO is a changed man. He’s a shitbag through and through.
Um, should I stop using Brave?
use librewolf if you want privacy. idk much abt brave but i do know that their ceo is super homophobic, and ive heard that brave sometimes changes the referral links you select to make them money
Only if you are going tor only. Im no expert but imo there is no better general purpose browser right now, both in terms of usability and privacy. Default firefox is a joke, librewolf is decent but it’s fingerprint protection relies on blending in which is difficult to achieve with it’s small userbase or if you have a lot of extensions and it’s identity separation is done manually through containers while brave uses randomization for fingerprinting, that doesn’t have this issue and it does site containerization between all tabs automatically. Ungoogled chromium is just brave without all the privacy benefits, mullvad browser is just tor browser without tor, which might be useful in some cases if you are using multiple browsers but I wouldn’t main it , and it has the same problems as librewolf. Opera is Chinese spyware, Vivaldi is whole ass operating system with a browser functionality, everything else is dead or not ready or not any better so yeah… I’ll be sticking with brave until something better comes along. If someone here knows a better alternative please let me know in the comment.
tor is crazy, like you cant use half the internet with it - how do you sign into stuff while remaining anonymus? its good for hiding browsing history from the world, but other than that i don think its the best. iIuse librewolf and it seems to work well, i might switch in the future to something else but im fine with this.
because they want ads that serve them things they want I imagine. EDIT: if ur downvoting me, say why. some people will see this as a feature
Jesus, that escalated quickly…
Ok how long after this browser goes live till we hear it being used by the FBI to track criminals.
I hate when people post hyperpartisan reporting because it makes me do homework. In this case, you made me listen to almost an hour of a three hour podcast with three techbros chatting about techbro crap in techbro ways. You owe me years of life.
Anyway, so the conspicuously missing context here is he’s asked if they will let go of the subscription model and go after an ad business model instead and he responds “hopefully not” and clarifies that he thinks the AI differentiator from Google search is that it doesn’t feed people ads.
He then transitions into saying that you’d need a super hyperspecialized profile for it to make sense and then maybe it could work but they haven’t figured out long term memory well enough for that, which is when he talks about why they’d want to have a browser to build that hyperspecialized profile.
This is my least favorite type of misinfo, too, because he’s actually kinda saying what they say he’s saying, just out of context. But more importantly, because he says some other shit that is more outrageous, too. For example, when explaining why he thinks the subscription business will grow more than the ad business the way he puts it is that “people see it as hiring someone”, so they’re more willing to spend, and he ponders “how much do people pay for personal assistants and assistant managers and nannies?” and suggests that they’ll provide similar services for cheaper to people who can’t afford human help.
Which may not be as clickbaity and I get he finds it positive-on-the-aggregate, but is certainly some cyberpunk dystopia stuff that didn’t need the out of context quoting to be a thing.
A scholar and a gentleman!
You owe me years of life.
Best I can do is an upvote and a hearty thank you.
Thank you!
Thanks for you sacrifice and service (it does sound like, but it is NOT sarcastic)
We need more people like you, thank you
Thank you!
There is an implication, though, that they intend to collect as much data as possible regardless of which model they use? And in the article, he isn’t selling any data, I think. Any mention of that?
To be clear, they ARE building an AI-forward browser and he is very plain about collecting a ton of user info. The way it’s presented in context is that they intend to plug it in to their assistant/agent thing and surface relevant stuff to you on searches (which is the potential ad opportunity the article quotes as if it was the sole goal). But yeah, the implication is that they are collecting data regardless, even if the user profile ends up being used to cater AI responses to you specifically, to train models or whatever.
Hearing the guy talk about it I get the impression that he envisions an Apple-like ecosystem where they’re constantly ingesting data and you’re paying them to have their AI services act as a personal assistant and handle purchases and booking for you directly and so on, on top of anwering queries.
I would rather clip my toenails with a rusty chainsaw, myself, but that seems to be the idea.
Thank you!
This is really good information, now I know to avoid their browser like the plague.
Hey, look for that browser to fail instantly as no one will use it.
They don’t want people to use it. They want Google to give them a big bag of money so they can integrate it into chrome.
Dumb and dumber will love it, ts,ts,ts. Some nerds…
Nothing wrong with typescript
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
You grossly underestimate how much some people truly love the idea of highly personalized ads. People who believe they are the best possible outcome and cannot fathom why anyone would have any problem with them at all. That’s who you are asking to dogfood this product, and they would and would find no issues with it.
