By skyforbes 
Like Perplexity before it, OpenAI has launched its own AI-powered web browser. ChatGPT Atlas promises to bring “instant answers, smarter suggestions, and help with tasks — all with privacy settings you can control”. But make no mistake, the real reason OpenAI, Perplexity and others are bringing new browsers to the market is not to help you — it’s to help them.
As a wise person once said, if the product is free, then you’re actual product. That saying originated in the 1970s as audience numbers and demographic data was being sold by TV stations to advertisers. Today, data about what we see, hear, buy and interact with online is being used to fuel AI models that will power everything from doing a student’s homework through to creating ads and pushing us towards products.
Between Perplexity Comet, Google AI Mode, and the new ChatGPT Atlas, a new browser war is on. But instead of the goal being dominance of the desktop, as we saw over 20 years ago when Internet Explorer killed off Netscape and Mozilla, the fight is for our data.
We live in a world where privacy is under constant threat. Aside from the data breaches and cyber attacks, that have all but destroyed the notion of private data, we now face the prospect of apps that purport to be helpful tools but are really designed to collect data.
