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126

Architecting Consent for AI: Deceptive Patterns in Firefox Link Previews (www.quippd.com)

submitted 2 days ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/technology@lemmy.world

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TL;DR: Mozilla has a new CEO and a new mission: transform Firefox into an AI browser. That has run into some snags, as Firefox users don’t seem that interested in AI. Mozilla is forging ahead, utilizing deceptive patterns (previously known as dark patterns) to nag and annoy people into enabling AI features. You can see this in the introduction of Link Previews, an extremely invasive anti-feature that exists solely to push AI into your experience.

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[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Not this seems overly reachy Firefox hate. This feature pushed months ago didn’t it? I managed to turn it off without even having to dig, and I know this because I don’t even remember how to do it.

Firefox defaulting a link preview gesture to on, but making the AI off by default, isn’t a dark pattern. Every new update doesn’t turn this back on if previously disabled. And trying to twist this into “Firefox is using dark patterns to trick you into using AI” just feels like an attempt to shove “Firefox bad” down people’s throats.

I find the amount of Firefox hate Lemmy seems to display so odd, especially when literally every other browser out there, from chrome to brave to opera, and everything in between, barely ever gets even a mention.

This stinks of negative advertising, and I’m getting so fucking tired of it.

[–] UnityDevice@startrek.website 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I tried the link preview feature as well, and to say the response to it is overblown is putting it mildly. I haven't looked at the source code, but based on how it appears to work I'm not sure it even qualifies as AI. It basically selects 2-3 sentences from the reading mode version of an article, but the selection is so bad it might as well be random. Not surprising as it's a tiny model that runs locally and is only given a second to make the selection.

I actually laughed when I saw it - this is what all the weeks of fuss were about?

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 12 hours ago

Pretty shocking that something this bad was pushed to you, then, no?

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Within the group of people who would use Firefox, you have tech folks, security folks, people who do their research on topics, and you have a load of generic "I hate big companies" contrarians. It's that last group who enjoy complaining.

[–] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Mozilla is not a big company, put in context.