Yeah, we "self-host" our app at AWS at work, which means we configure everything ourselves. I "self-host" a VPS at Hetzner for personal projects, and my actual data is actually self-hosted on a machine on my LAN.
In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.
And what term might be used to describe the location of the datacenter down the hall, that is not used to describe the one across the country? It’s pretty standard in IT, but also used outside of IT by normal people for things such as describing a pub.
The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.
The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.
It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.
This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.
It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.
Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.
That’s a given. Google Cloud Platform is managed through the same Google Cloud Console as everything else, which is in Google’s datacenter, even when it it’s running locally - unless you opt for an air-gapped option. It’s how companies can make data locality claims while using the same tools and one of the selling points pushed by cloud services.
We use third parties to provide the Service to you, and have contracted with these companies requiring them to protect your information (Third-Party Services):
Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud-computing platform. We use GCP to manage services that facilitate responses to user prompts and page summarization.