Welp, so much for you.com/chat, which I had been getting into as a decent AI-based chat search tool. They added a sign-in requirement it seems, so you cannot submit messages/queries without an account.
It was an okay tool, but I don’t even have a Google account (and don’t want one), so I’m not going to sign up for this. I mean, the chat is fine, but the rest of the site is weird and janky.
This was the same thing that stopped me from joining the waitlist for Bing. Microsoft couldn’t resist trying to force me to make a Microsoft account, something which I’ve also held out eternally against doing.
To whoever is making these calls, there’s no way in hell I’m giving some random company (or even a well-established company) a complete record of all my queries and personal data, etc. Bye bye.
Tim B.
https://about.you.com/hc/faq/how-do-i-delete-my-profile/
“If you’d like to delete your profile and your data you can email us at legal@you.com and we will promptly take care of it.”
Absolute fail:
https://www.timboucher.ca/2023/02/building-account-deletion-exports-is-not-optional/
Tim B.
Also, imo, to evenly distribute accessibility of AI tools throughout the population, there need to be public ones available that require no account & have no data collection.
Tim B.
UPDATE:
Okay, so I investigated this more & it seems like as a logged out user, if you click on the user avatar menu in upper right corner, and select “Switch to private” you can still use the AI chat search logged out.
Unclear yet if that will persist between sessions…
Tim B.
https://twitter.com/RichardSocher/status/1627105095690383360?t=2u3DvuGLDviPsElBc5xE7w&s=19
CEO says they “have to” switch to this model, but realistically, they chose to.