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by Communitivity 877 days ago
I had a thought while reading this, and I don't know if this would be the case but...

If it works by you hover over a link and Google gets the content in the browser behind the scenes and sends it to the mothership, where it's summarized and the summary then sent back to you to be displayed by the browser, then you may be accessing the linked page using your stored credentials, which give Google access to content they wouldn't otherwise have access to.

2 comments

The same is true for translations in most browsers, right? At least I'm not aware of any browser that does it client-side/offline.

Edit: I stand corrected, Firefox does it offline! Thank you, Firefox team, this is awesome and I'll likely be using it more often now :)

Firefox does local LLM based translation. I kicked that project off in 2022 and it shipped last year.
Thank you, I find it really useful
> Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There's no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

Oh, cool! I somehow misremembered that very announcement as being cloud-based (but using an open model).
Firefox does it offline
Sounds like a sneaky way to add your personal social media feed into their AI training data.

Edit: the suggestion that translation functionality already does this is valid though perhaps this expands the scope to data in the users default language?