Beware testing Firefox "Smart Window": Mozilla sends a summary of earlier activity to 3rd parties

submitted by XLE to privacy 55 points | 10 comments I was reading a review of Firefox’s experimental Smart Window feature, and this stood out as a potential huge issue: > Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses. > > You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them. > > Fine so far. > > The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no. > > It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features. > > Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront. > > I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window. > > Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix. > > Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess. This news leaves me with more questions than answers: * Was this summarized on enabling this window, or earlier? * Did it use an existing model, or re-use one that someone may have already downloaded for a different feature? * Is this activity going anywhere else, like Mozilla’s recent “privacy-preserving” advertising? * When this releases, what will the default be?