It seems like some companies have entered into the “adding the most AI tools into products” competition. Microsoft seems to be winning, with its pushing of AI into lots of its products. The company introduced Copilot Toolbar for Android recently, and many future Windows devices will even feature a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard.
Google launched Chrome 121 earlier this week and announced new AI tools that it included in the browser. These are limited to a small subset of users at the time but will roll out to more in the coming weeks and months.
One of the tools is called Tab Organizer. Google promises that the AI tool helps users bring order to their tabs. It does so by finding tabs suitable to be put into tab groups.
Tab groups is an excellent tab management feature. Open tabs may be placed into groups, or created there directly. A group can be collapsed, so that it occupies just a single tab on Chrome’s tab bar, even if it holds dozens or hundreds of tabs.
Tab Organizer
Google announced Tab Organizer on the official company blog The Keyword as part of three AI tools for Chrome.
Google writes: “With Tab Organizer, Chrome will automatically suggest and create tab groups based on your open tabs. This can be particularly helpful if you’re working on several tasks in Chrome at the same time, like planning a trip, researching a topic and shopping.”
The feature is available to a selection of users from the United States only at the time. These users need to be signed-in to Google Chrome and they need to enable the Tab Organizer feature first.
This is done by selecting Menu > Experimental AI > Try out experimental AI features > Tab Organizer and then selecting relaunch.
Tab Organizer is then accessible via the Tab Search icon in Chrome’s main toolbar, by right-clicking on tabs and selecting “Organize similar tabs”, or through the Chrome Menu.
Google’s AI will then suggest to put tabs into specific groups. Users may remove tabs from the list of suggestions and rename the tab group for better identification. A click on “create group” creates the tab group based on the selections.
The huge privacy issue
What Google’s announcement on The Keyword blog does not reveal is that Google collects all page titles and URLs when the feature is used.
This is confirmed on a Google Chrome Help page:
When you use Tab organizer, the page titles and URLs of open tabs in the active window and your feedback are collected. As described in our Google Privacy Policy, this information is used to improve this feature, which includes generative model research and machine learning technologies.
In other words, Google knows about any URL and page title open at the time. Since Tab Organizer requires to be signed-in, it could also link the information to the Google account.
Google says that human reviewers may look at the data as part of the review process.
A policy is available for Enterprise and Education users to block the data collecting from happening. No such option is provided for other users.
Closing Words
Most Chrome users may want to avoid the feature, unless they have no problems that it submits all URLs and page titles to Google.
While the feature can be useful, especially if hundreds of tabs need to get organized, it may be better in most cases to use the feature manually instead to avoid any leaks to Google.
With AI tools, it seems to become necessary to ask about privacy implications first before even considering using a tool.
Now You: what is your take on this?