I sent in a support ticket asking them to save Firefox and stop all this AI bullshit
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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I'm sure their support appreciates that a lot.
I hope they do
Yeah, there is a lot they can do about it.
Email their CEOs or some shit instead.
Fuck off
"Yeah sorry boss, i didn't actually read the email, instead i had an AI summarize it for me and it got a key detail wrong. Anyway what's a couple thousand dollars in lost sales right"
https://orbitbymozilla.com/terms
4. Content
A. Content You Share
By using the Services, you represent that you will only share material (including Inputs) that you own and/or have the legal right to share and sublicense to others, including without limitation, content and data contained in any web-page shared through the Services to generate Outputs. When you submit your own content through the Services, you continue to own the rights to that content. You grant Mozilla a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, sub-license, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the Inputs for the purpose of operating the Services.
Thanks for the link to the privacy policy. You notice, at the bottom, it has links to both "About Mozilla" and "About FakeSpot"?
When you run the Orbit extension, it connects to two domains with every request:
- orbitbymozilla.com
- prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net
There's FakeSpot again.
And FakeSpot has a terrible privacy policy that allows sale of private data directly to advertisers.
Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.
Hmm.
>locally hosted
>Google Cloud
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Sounds like they’re running their own LLM instance on googles cloud infrastructure vs using something like OpenAI via API.
As web dev parlance it makes sense but for marketing it is definitely confusing and they should do better.
Remember how the cloud is someone else’s server? Now you can buy it (or lease) and bring it home, and it becomes only sorta someone else’s.
Amazon and Azure offer their own on-prem products.
Information We Share.
We use third parties to provide the Service to you, and have contracted with these companies requiring them to protect your information (Third-Party Services):
Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud-computing platform. We use GCP to manage services that facilitate responses to user prompts and page summarization.
"Locally hosted" means it's running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.
Calling something that is only accessible over the internet "locally hosted" is outrageous doublespeak.
Why does it mean that?
Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.
If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?
My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?
In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.
The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.
The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.
IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.
Hadn't checked, that is not a hard requirement for the platform - assuming they actually have it in their infrastructure.
If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”
Then that would also be an oxymoron.
Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.
It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.
This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.
It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.
Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.
We actually do have better terminology for "local to Mozilla" and "remote to Mozilla"... It's first party and third party.
And, from the looks of it, Mozilla is indeed using Google Cloud Services as a third party, according to their privacy policy.
That’s a given. Google Cloud Platform is managed through the same Google Cloud Console as everything else, which is in Google’s datacenter, even when it it’s running locally - unless you opt for an air-gapped option. It’s how companies can make data locality claims while using the same tools and one of the selling points pushed by cloud services.
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I don't want that. I want full control and absolute privacy. I do not want your AI reading my emails. Look at that summary, it's as long as the whole email, and you're not going to be able to trust that it picked up on the most important part of the email. This is not efficiency, this is novelty.
Well, you can just... not install the extension then?
I won't. But my concern is that Mozilla is heading in the wrong direction lately, and I have used Firefox for a very long time.
We always told them we want things to be optional, and now this is an extension so I dunno. Seems they're listening?
Then don't install the extension?
So do you actually draw the line at Mozilla never building stuff like this into their browser, or is that a line you would be willing to cross too?
“AI you can trust” …
I won't trust the AI Mozilla uses until they show us the source data. Not the source code that consumes a massive binary blob; the stuff that generated the binary blob they are using.
Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.
So it connects to Google Cloud for this? What does that mean "locally", if its a Cloud Platform? And what does that mean "Mozilla's", if its Google? I'm a bit confused with this sentence.
Does it download and execute it locally offline or does it send the data to Google Cloud Platform?? The page is not clear about this and I searched for an answer. I have the same Mistral 7B model that I downloaded from HuggingFace website and can use offline with a specific GUI application. It would be nice if I could Firefox point to that file instead.
Otherwise, this does not look very promising and I wouldn't trust it at the moment.
Google Distributed Cloud allows you to run Google Cloud Platform locally in your own datacenter. They can deploy apps to that infrastructure and use the cloud console for management, or even use normal kubernetes tools for it.
Couldn’t say if that’s what they’re actually doing, but running Google Cloud locally is a thing.
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why are they promoting web-based mail when their email solution is thunderbird?
Thunderbird is more a community project that's outside of Mozilla's jurisdiction at this point
Thunderbird is built by a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, it just isn’t the Mozilla Corporation.
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Not available on mobile, which is sad. I consume 99% of my internet via mobile devices.
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