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Encrypted chatbots, gen-AI privacy to open up this year: Mozilla president Mark Surman Encrypted chatbots, gen-AI privacy to open up this year: Mozilla president Mark Surman

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Privacy-first user experiences in generative AI are poised to go mainstream this year as consumer discomfort around data sharing rises, Mark Surman, president and board member of web browser Mozilla, told Mint.

Surman said that while generative AI may spell the end of conventional data privacy, “there are a lot of innovations happening to make sure that those who aren’t comfortable with AI and the kind of data sharing it needs will have alternate solutions to fall back upon.”

“We’re seeing the advent of end-to-end encrypted chatbots on the generative AI market right now, where the company at the other end who’s running the chatbots cannot see the messages that you’re sending, or your usage. On the other hand, we’re developing something called ‘portable private memory’, which we believe is a core technology that will let users have control over their data,” Surman said.

The ‘portable private memory’ that Surman spoke about is still in engineering stages at Mozilla Foundation, the parent body of the company’s popular web browser. The product conceptually suggests that the usage activity of users on any popular generative AI chatbot, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, should belong to the user—and not the company.

“The question that we’re trying to answer is why should the context that users give to a generative AI chatbot be exclusive to each platform,” Surman said.

“As a result, portable private memory will seek to capture all the usage, context and memory lent by a user to a platform, and make it transferable and usable across any AI platform. This would make chatbots more superior in terms of understanding a user, and give a user choice and privacy in terms of which platform or service they want to use,” he said.

Scale and competition

As per web analytics platform Statista, the global web browser market has 6 billion yearly active users. With a 2.3% market share, Mozilla has approximately 140 million annual active users on its web browsing platform, Firefox. A portfolio document by Mozilla Foundation published in November last year pegged the company’s annual revenue run rate at $600 million for 2025.

Mozilla is the world’s largest independent web browser, with its larger counterparts Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge all coming preinstalled in billions of devices every year in Android and iOS phones, as well as Mac and Windows computers.

Privacy debate returns

Questions of privacy have repeatedly surfaced over the past three years as generative AI’s rise has intensified large-scale data harvesting by major technology companies. For companies such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, access to vast troves of usage data is critical to improving foundational AI models.

While privacy remains peripheral to mainstream policy discourse, experts believe feature evolutions would hinge upon technical feasibility.

“Encryption is, of course, important from a standalone data privacy standpoint. But, it’s important to consider it from the aspect of both technical feasibility, as well as how a generative AI application would be affected if they did not have access to a person’s usage data,” said Anushka Jain, research associate at policy research firm, Digital Futures Lab. “In many use cases, users would want the chatbot to contextually learn and offer better responses, so from that end, it might not be a one-size-fits-all solution—even though data privacy is an important part of internet usage.”

Jain also added that the idea of migrating personas and memory of usage across generative AI platforms would depend a lot on the tech platforms themselves, “since each platform offers its own characteristics and isn’t just restricted to what they learn from a user.”

According to Surman, users who demand privacy and untraceability on the internet will certainly see new products being developed in the long run.

India focus

To do this, the company is seeing India as a market to focus on to grow its platform in the near future.

“Our browser is already available in over 10 Indian languages, and we’re thrilled by a vibrant open source internet community in India, which is one of the largest in the world. To capitalize on this, we’re looking to popularize Mozilla in India, and market our products to a larger volume of the audience—even if it is through our standalone generative AI browsing mode in local languages,” Surman said.

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