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Comment by 2ndorderthought | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually privacy preserving? Chrome mostly exists to extract all the information from a user it can without immediately getting a lawsuit of greater penalty than what is gained through ads, military contracts, etc. Android isn't too far off either. I would welcome any alternative to this. I can see applications for this being things like "while device is at rest and charging summarize all of the users recent text communications" or whatever else as a legal loop hole for wiretap laws

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>I can see applications for this being things like "while device is at rest and charging summarize all of the users recent text communications" or whatever else as a legal loop hole for wiretap laws

This just exposes an API for sites to use. If they wanted to do the types of spying you're cynically suggesting, they could just add it without an API and you'd be none the wiser. Chrome contains closed source components so you wouldn't even know.

It's a lot easier to hide the language they need in a EULA for a feature like this than it would be elsewhere.

I appreciate you feel this is a cynical take. But have you seen the class action lawsuits against Google over the last 5 years? They exceed a billion dollars as far as I can remember and they are for more blatant things than this.

>It's a lot easier to hide the language they need in a EULA for a feature like this than it would be elsewhere.

Why would adding a ML API or library require an EULA change?

So they don't get sued when the LLM inevitably instructs someone to drink bleach, hurt a stranger, delete the production db(I guess vibe coders say this is a good thing now though?), etc.

Do you think no-one would notice that the Chrome download was 20GB larger?

Who says they'll be using the 20GB model? You'd hardly need frontier level intelligence to detect CSAM or ad keywords. Moreover, it's downloaded on first use, not bundled with the browser, so you won't really notice unless you're checking the chrome user data directory, but that also contains caches and other site data you'd likely chalk it up to random sites.

Hey, I'm the Chrome PM for the built-in AI APIs. I wanted to jump in on the privacy concern mentioned here.

It’s a totally valid question, and transparency is the only way this can work. On-device processing is an important core design goal of these APIs.

There are NO logs of the input / output interactions sent to any server, not even for training purposes. The only metrics we have are on performance, stability, and other generic API usage signals like any other APIs. These are all controlled by existing user preferences in Chrome.

Do you know if the android team plans to have access to this tool or if there is a plan for Android or chrome to integrate like this? Or maybe better, will other Google teams plan to use this tool to your knowledge to extract more user information? Surely this could change but it's always good to know.

Forgive my untrusting nature but I've been burned through several Google abuses of trust. I guess it doesn't matter much to me anymore I will never use chrome again, but maybe someone else is in the fence.

This comment sure didn't age well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

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