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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

I think google did this to force AI on us. Does not matter to me, I left google a year or 2 ago.

Makes me wonder about Google and AI, with my tin-foil hat on, I cannot help but think Google/AI searches your cache and cookies looking for info.

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Google has questionable behavior in its browser[0] and tracking technologies[1] that sound similar to what you describe, but I believe the search itself is behaving normally. It runs slowly because all LLM chatbots use tons of processing power to pore through servers full of data that may or may not be accurate.

I agree Google is trying to force AI on us, but for a different reason: to demonstrate its value to shareholders.

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-priva...

[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/01/google-is-all...

The way web applications work, there is domain separation of data (be it cache or cookies), so googles "AI" isn't going to be able to read data that it already didn't have access to before.

this wouldn't matter if the page itself was calling the AI thingamajig

This isn't making sense to me. Due to the same-origin policy, anything on google.com can only access the cookies and other application data stored there by google.com. Doesn't matter if it's JavaScript or an "AI", Google can't break the same-origin policy and read cookies from other domains. AI changes nothing about this.

(Google services' widespread use by 3rd party sites does give them more data, but they have that whether you load google.com with JS or not. And again, unclear how AI changes anything about what data is available to them.)

Google can eventually allow anything on their domains to access whatever they want in the future and the end user can do nothing about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40918052

If they do go this route it'd of course be highly controversial (not that they care), but also limited to Chrome. Even if they dare put it in Chromium itself, Brave, Vivaldi, etc would rip it out. Microsoft would just redirect the collection in Edge to their servers.

> Makes me wonder about Google and AI, with my tin-foil hat on, I cannot help but think Google/AI searches your cache and cookies looking for info.

This is nonsense. Any cached data or cookies that Google’s scripts have access to was saved by those same scripts. If any site’s “AI” (not sure what you mean by that) could search through objects cached by other sites, you’d have bigger problems.

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