With AI being added to seemingly every product and service today, its no surprise that AI companies have gotten into the browser game either creating browser extensions or creating their own browser.
OpenAI is touting its AI-enabled browser called Atlas, designed to both remember all activity, search that activity, chat, and do any number of AI-enhanced things. OpenAI rival Perplexity has a browser product called Comet. There are even sidebar browser extensions for Microsoft Copilot and Gemini. Some browsers, such as Firefox and Brave come with an AI sidebar but uses your choice of LLM.
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The danger of AI browsers
These AI browsers and AI browser extensions are designed to help – to make doing tasks on the internet easier, make it easier to find data, easier to retrieve data, and overall help with the experience of using the internet. The intentions are good – but the methods necessary to make helpful AI features is the one that precludes the use of AI browsers and AI browser extensions by enterprises and by individuals.
To make these features work, the AI must be watching everything – your passwords, all text onscreen or typed, URLs, videos, graphics, everything. That is shared with the AI in the cloud. There is now a record of all browser-based activities. Even if that data was only stored locally, its very existence is an issue. That data can be subpoenaed, sold, stolen by hackers, distributed, or even seized by the government.
Safeguards and drawbacks
All these AI companies have multiple safeguards to protect data, have stated policy on how such data can be used and where, and are being pretty upfront about how and when they use your data. They allow you to pick and choose when the AI is available or even forget after a session. Companies adding these AI features to the browser are legitimately trying to make the lives of users easier with AI and protect user privacy.
But giving any corporation a detailed record of all activities conducted on the internet and the metadata around it could have disastrous consequences in the long term. Companies get bought, end user agreements change, or investors could simply demand that all that personal data is monetised. Companies go out of business, what happens to the data? Many countries do not have any legal mechanism to force businesses to delete data on request or after a certain time.
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By GlobalDataEveryone wants tools that work better, some of the features in AI browsers are impressive and likely even more features will be coming, but that shouldn’t be at the expense of risking all your personal data or risking the company’s data, no matter how nice the tools are.
This is about ensuring personal privacy and the data security of enterprises, which is why enterprises and individuals should take a pass on AI browsers and browser extensions.
