Privacy browser extensions misled users and sold 8 million AI chat logs, exposing sensitive conversations for profit without consent.

Urban VPN is a particularly bad offender. It intercepts all your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI bots (glad I don’t use any), and sends them to the VPN vendor for resale. This is nuts.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    If the price is free, you are the product

    I think you’re both right, actually. But when I’m explaining it to people I add “If the price is free and the software isn’t open source…you are the product”

    It’s the basic value proposition. If a piece of software is being given to you for free from a company that wants to make a profit…they’ll be making that profit off your information. If a company/community driven project is free and open source, it means that they have different motivations than profit and you can be somewhat more sure of your privacy.