Notices by Floppy 💾 (floppy@fosstodon.org)

Follow-up: Two weeks ago I asked about how Firefox' new AI chatbot integration fares regarding privacy.

By accident I found information on it in Mozilla's knowledge base [1] and a related article by them on privacy and chatbots [2].

Short answer: Mozilla does not read conversations, but some metadata is collected. Chatting with chatbots has the usual implications.

Some answers in the FAQ [1] I found particularly helpful, see screenshot.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
[2] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/how-to-protect-your-privacy-from-chatgpt-and-other-ai-chatbots/

Since recently, Firefox has a built-in interface for chat bots.

Whether that's good or bad is a different discussion. Anyway this feature exists now and people might use it. So it makes sense to know what we are dealing with.

Does integration of chat bots in Firefox respect my privacy? Since I can chat with LLMs without needing a login or key, is my data anonymised?

I guess that's not the case, but maybe somebody knows more.

(edit: improved phrasing)
(edit: partial self-answer, see thread)

My posting and interaction frequency will be lower on this account until at least Christmas due to planned, non-technical reasons and commitments. (Also retroactively for some weeks.) To be returned!

@phranck In case you're interested, I did a similar (much smaller) poll in 2020 on the number of used accounts.

https://fosstodon.org/@floppy/105275932107020757

Such polls shouldn't be compared uncritically, but I believe comparison over time will show a trend towards additional accounts for special interests (possibly on themed instances).

I think that is a natural process that might reflect how humans take different roles (identities?) in different social groups. I'm curious how this plays out on the #fediverse.

"Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI"

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486

"An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for it's AI projects."

@freemo

Thank you for this write-up. Being around for a while, I head the rumours around QOTO and without knowing the other side of the story, rumours were all I had. Your article clears up a lot and I wish for you and QOTO that your call is being heard.

Before reading, I struggled a bit with the title of the article, but now I get what you were going for of course.

(1/2)

@freemo

I find the write-up contains (at least) two important points: The history of QOTO (with valuable background info) and Eugen's early and impactful recent reactions.

Since the title lists only one, it might be a bit misleading ("clickbait title", as you put it). Wave you considered splitting it into two articles or use title that captures both aspects? I wonder if that might help the circulation of the article.

(2/2)

@Graycot Regarding FLOSS smartwatches, what do you think of the PineTime from @PINE64? You might be interested in having a look at the wiki.

https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime#Datasheets,_Schematics_and_Certifications

BangleJS seems to be a similar project.

https://banglejs.com/

A more DIY approach might be Open SmartWatch (as in print your PCB and case).

https://open-smartwatch.github.io/

https://www.makerfabs.com/open-smartwatch.html

Related is AsteroidOS, which runs on proprietary hardware.

https://asteroidos.org/wiki/porting-status/