Perplexity AI is a wonderful engine and very useful for me. Full disclosure, I am a monthly paid user at the $20/mo level. I see Perplexity AI designed a browser called Comet. I am an amateur on this subject, but Comet purports to use agents to perform certain actions. Examples include ordering goods on Amazon, designing a walking tour in London, searching for and watching videos, emailing and managing email and other tasks. https://www.perplexity.ai/comet
David published his video initial take on Comet ordering goods on Amazon and shopping for recipe ingredients, all very impressive to me. Thanks David.
YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyZ-hmhUbVc
It appears Comet is not available yet generally, but I signed up for the waitlist.
Looking at the Perplexity Legal Hub, I took a Quick Look at the terms of service. Observing and not judging, but it looks to me like use of the cool functionality allows Perplexity to use my data, sell my data, and use it to improve the services, among other uses. Full privacy agreement link here: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/legal/privacy-policy
Using the cool services, such as email and calendars, seem to expose my personal data to Perplexity. In part: “You may also have the ability to sync your third party email account or calendar (such as Gmail and Google Calendar) with the Services. If you choose to sync these accounts, we will have access to your contacts and information from the email messages and calendar appointments in your email account, including the content of your emails (together, “Email Service Information ”).” And there is more in the TOS.
It may be the trade-off by using AI and agents is to lose control of our data. Perhaps I am worrying excessively.
Throwing the question out to this board for your sophisticated and measured thoughts.
Surely that does not mean you give the permission to peruse your data randomly or to train AI with it. It does mean they have to access it to provide the service you signed up for. And that does carry some risk of a data breach.
Hopefully this isn’t news to you, but your paid plan to Perplexity will give them similar rights to train using the data you send in prompts. It’s only if you’re an Enterprise user will you have the option to opt out.
Sometimes people misunderstand the right to sync your data and present it as the ability to do whatever they want with it.
I got in this weekend and immediately knew I would not be using Comet as my main browser due to Perplexity being able to access everything within the browser. I use Perplexity a lot and will use Comet for specific issues, but giving access to every move I make in a browser is too much.
I can generate 1 more invite for Comet. Reply first and I will dm you. I will edit the message when the invite is gone. @GMS I have an invite for you if you want to DM me.
I got the invite and had a quick play but won’t be using it daily due to the privacy concerns, mainly in a work context. It’s fun though, watching it click through my Reddit settings to turn off New Reddit was pretty neat.
My favourite use of the agent so far was to extract order information from 3 different Japanese shopping websites and add the info to a CSV file, so that I can more easily search through 300+ orders. Would have taken me hours manually and have been very error prone.
