Had not heard about this company, but I’m perplexed by their being this blatantly upfront about their aim to “track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads” in a bid to out-google Google, seems dystopian to me.
They are building a browser because they ‘want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”’
I know there are other companies out there that have the same goals, but at least they are secretive about it. Perhaps Perplexity should be given a medal for their honesty?
That said, I don’t think Linux users are the target audience for browsers like this. I’m not saying everyone who uses Linux is deeply committed to privacy, free software, or standing up to tech giants—but it’s still depressing how companies can do whatever they want with our digital lives without facing any consequences.
I don’t care if they’re ‘honest’ (and really, is that the bare minimum we should expect?). Every company is racing toward constant surveillance, and they don’t even have the decency to be ashamed about it.
I mean, just the fact of that comment alone I would imagine turns their product DOA.
Noone would choose to use it over something else, unless it tries to pay its users or something.
One of the reasons I personally don’t use Perplexity since I saw their privacy policy before to verify them a long time ago. Regardless of how open or up front they are I won’t like them for doing it. Gangs, mafias, and thugs are also usually quite up front with you when they want something, and I don’t see them any better for it, since they still choose to do those actions. I prefer good actions rather than openness to do negative.
I don’t think I have found an AI product that isn’t trying sell “you” or steal “your” data, whether images or information, in some way, and even if there are ones that are fine nothing stops them from suddenly changing the policy on you which companies like Adobe (scanning stock photos to train AI) and Apple (Complying with UK law to scan files as well as client side scanning with AI to try and bypass end-to-end encryption) have done already, best just not to risk it since I don’t owe them any trust.
I just don’t bother with “AI” tools in general as the few I have tested in the past have never been useful and I have to verify all sources where they grab their information from too, which has been sketchy on what it would use as a source and multiple different contexts between them, so I may as well have just manually looked up what I wanted and picked the sources I want from the results myself from the start and it’s faster.
