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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

Tracking prevention in Edge makes sense for Microsoft, as they already have more than enough tracking in windows itself.

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That's why I think that Microsoft is walking a fine line here, blocking other people trackers while keeping their own may be considered anti-competitive. If Edge had the market share IE had in the past, that would be calling for legal trouble.

Google themselves also suffer a lot from bad actors. Many people start installing ad blockers after visiting abusive sites, and these ad blockers block the more tolerable Google ads as a collateral. For that reason, they want to introduce a built-in ad blocker in Chrome, and unsurprisingly, given their position, they are taking a lot of precautions.

Isn't Google basically a primary threat actor for any society/collective trying to maintain equality through symmetry of information?

Do you think they’re trying to monopolise user data to sell to advertisers?

Well, I don't think there is any reason why MSFT wouldn't dream that, just that they don't have a magic wand to do that. They do however are trying to add more and more tracking to Windows, which is what they do control.

targeting ads is only one teeny tiny use case for user data. Building general AI is a race and the more user data you have the faster your AI will learn. You definitely want to limit the amount of data your competitors have.

How users use computers has very little to do for a useful AI.

Or... if most knowledge work happens on a computer, and you just want the AI to replace knowledge workers, then maybe how people use computers is the only thing the AI needs to know.

Probably true for AGI but the overloaded term "AI" could be applied to learn from how people use software to _carefully_ suggest improvements.

Usage stats could help you improve a user interface, teach users new skills (eg: "you always do this, here's a shortcut to save you time"), perhaps more personalized operating system interfaces and defaults.

You probably don't need a fancy pseudo "AI" system for any of these, but that's the current gold rush so someone's gonna do it

I look forward to the day when the term 'AGI' gets co-opted by marketers and we need to come up with a new term for true AGI (TAGI?).

That's pretty absurd considering the average american has a screen in front of their face 8-10 hours a day. You're basically saying what people do for 8-10 hours a day, every day, for their entire lives isnt useful information to AI.

The vast majority of the revenue for half of the biggest tech companies is one teeny use case?

It's the biggest one, followed by company specific recommendation engines.

teeny tiny use case for general AI, yes.

Atleast getting tracked by one is better than getting tracked by two.

it's ridiculous. i only realize it when i install pihole and microsoft is there at #1 tracking domain

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