Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: ChatGPT

illustration of a concerned man contemplating privacy concerns with ChatGPT Atlas

Why AI Web Browsers Can Be Dangerous

October 27, 2025 / / 1 Comment

Being an early adopter of new tech for about three decades now, why wouldn’t I want to jump right into using the new ChatGPT Atlas web browser? Well, that was my thinking before I read a recent article in Digital Trends.

The following paragraphs are excerpts from that article:

ChatGPT can also connect with your Gmail inbox, WhatsApp, Slack, cloud storage services, and more.

With agent mode, you can go shopping or make reservations with just a text prompt. It works autonomously by handling the clicks and types on your behalf. It’s pretty surreal to witness in action, but that’s where the problems begin.

Can you trust an AI agent (and an integrated browser) with sensitive data, such as login credentials? In ChatGPT Atlas, for example, the browser remembers not only your web surfing activity, but also your chat history. And the way it logs all that information is extremely scary. It opens a whole new world of hyper-personalized advertisement and privacy risks.

~ ~ ~

“These tools are contextual engines trained on our behaviors, inputs, and queries. What happens when your browser knows more about you than your partner?” he adds. The risks are grave. In August, user conversations with ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok chatbot were leaked, exposing thousands of conversations on Google Search. Back then, experts pointed out that chatbots are a deeper privacy disaster than browsers.

Mixing the two sure sounds like a calamitous recipe. “If anyone is considering being an early adopter, I’d recommend using these tools cautiously, giving them minimal permissions and blocking their abilities for potentially damaging actions,” warns Feinberg, whose company works at the intersection of AI and security.

An engineer at an AI company, talking on condition of anonymity, told me that despite working on consumer AI products, they are wary of connecting all the services you use with a single chatbot ecosystem. AI assistants are a lot more personal than web browsers, and linking them to other products that you use on a daily basis — from Amazon to Spotify — is like letting an AI company profile your entire life.

One has to draw the line, one where they can balance the convenience of AI browsers with their privacy perils. The shift, however, is inevitable.

(end of excerpts)

For me, I’m happy to wait for what Apple — the reigning King of Privacy — may come up with. I’ll have much more to say then. And I predict it won’t be long. I can even wait till 2026.

robot contemplating the future
Robot contemplating the future, created by me using OpenAI's DALL-E.

My 2023 Predictions Post

January 1, 2023 / / 1 Comment

I asked AI to help me peer into the future. As is my custom, that resulted in me doing my top ten predictions:

robot contemplating the future

Robot contemplating the future, created by me using OpenAI’s DALL-E.

1) I predict, as things move so quickly these days, it will become much more common to see monthly predictions posts popping up. A year is now like a decade.

2) For the first year ever, there will be more articles written about AI than the number of orders of fries McDonalds will sell.

3) More than 60% of Americans will pay no income tax — oh, wait, that’s already the case.

4) Elon Musk will be richer at the end of the year than he is now. But he won’t care.

5) Twitter will go public (again), which will restart the IPO market. The media will refuse to give Elon Musk credit for that, but, you guessed it, he won’t care.

6) The NFL will end the year with more money than God — but God, not a huge football fan, will demand a recount.

7) The number of minutes of commercials on the average NFL game will be more than double the number of actual game minutes.

8) Gopher football will lose to Iowa again. (Kirk Ferentz beats PJ Fleck like a rented mule.)

9) I will not stop talking about football.

10) I might stop doing predictions posts.

p.s. Okay, wanna see what AI would really predict for 2023? Here’s a fun piece from a UK site:
We Made AI Predict What Will Happen In 2023, Here’s What It Said.

——

UPDATE 1/2/23:
Speaking of restarting the IPO market, I see Forbes just published a piece naming their picks for companies that are likely to go public in 2023. They don’t have the balls to pick Twitter, as I do — haha! But one of theirs has Elon’s name all over it: SpaceX. There you go — one of the reasons why I said Elon will be richer at the end of the year! I posted the Forbes piece in my new Flipboard magazine, “IPO COMEBACK.”

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