Uploading location data with requests is a feature of the device. It's supposed to take your location into account so you can ask it questions like "What's the weather forecast?"
The article is sparse on when the information is sent to the servers. If location data is being sent with requests, that's hardly a surprise.
No. The whole product is an abstraction to different software interfaces. If it sends data, it should sent it to the weather API, not to Rabbit servers nor even log it, because the information is relevant only at that moment.
Even if they route all traffic through their backend, their should log only errors. There is really no reason to store the location history on OS level.
That's not how the device works. The weather and location data are both context inputs to an LLM. The LLM produces the response and sends it to the device. The LLM runs on the server, not the device.
You can't have the device connect to a separate weather API unless you send keys to the device, which would require per-user access credentials (good luck finding a 3rd party provider happy to do that). It would also increase the number of round trips, which increases response delay, which is one of the primary complaints about the device.
What can/does the Rabbit add to it above what a simple string concatenation would?
Weather was just an example. You can't predict every combination of weather related questions that someone might want to ask and force those into predetermined response strings.
The idea is to be able to ask things like "What days this week are best for having an afternoon picnic?" and get a reasonable answer back.
If your goal is to hide as much of your personal information as possible from 3rd parties, you're not in the target audience for these products. Nothing wrong with that, it's just targeted at a different demographic of people.
Typically the LLM queries external tools as appropriate and then incorporates the result into the response.
The llm is there to understand that you've said "what's the weather?" not, say "call me an uber", and then to collate the responses from potentially several calls to websites and produce a natural language response.
There is a layer of upsell/hustle/scam[1] on top of that where they said they had a "large action model" which learned your preferences and understood how all these websites worked sematically so the actions would be robust etc and a bunch of other stuff which turned out not to be true.
[1] depending on your point of view. I would encourage people to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPOHf20slZg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLvFc_24vSM and do whatever personal research and make their own minds up
However, in these days weather APIs are the ones you can actually query without API keys.
See, for example. https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
There is a forecast for you:
`curl -X GET "https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80/forecast" \ -H "Accept: application/geo+json" `
All the third-party APIs for weather just try to artificially monetize them, because under the hood the information is typically governmental funded.
See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589172