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?