Comment on Dia, The Browser Company’s AI-first browser, launches Mac beta - 9to5Mac
Sandbar_Trekker@lemmy.today 2 days ago
I had to click to figure out just what an “AI Browser” is.
It’s basically Copilot/Recall but only for your browser. If the models are run locally, the information is protected, and none of that information is transmitted, then I don’t see a problem with this (although they would have to prove it with being open source). But, as it is, this just looks like a browser with major privacy/security flaws.
At launch, Dia’s core feature is its AI assistant, which you can invoke at any time. It’s not just a chatbot floating on top of your browser, but rather a context-aware assistant that sees your tabs, your open sessions, and your digital patterns. You can use it to summarize web pages, compare info across tabs, draft emails based on your writing style, or even reference past searches.
Reading into it a bit more:
Agrawal is also careful to note that all your data is stored and encrypted on your computer. “Whenever stuff is sent up to our service for processing,” he says, “it stays up there for milliseconds and then it’s wiped.” Arc has had a few security issues over time, and Agrawal says repeatedly that privacy and security have been core to Dia’s development from the very beginning. Over time, he hopes almost everything in Dia can happen locally.
Yeah, the part about sending my data of everything appearing on my browser window (passwords, banking, etc.) to some other computer for processing makes the other assurances worthless. At least they have plans to get everything running locally, but this is a hard pass for me.