I think this is the article from *PNI Gizmodo is referencing: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article... - and here's the detail page for the AI Bot in question: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/romanti...

All I could find was this:

> As part of our research, we looked to see how many trackers the app sends out when you use it. Trackers are little bits of code that gather information about your device, or your use of the app, or even your personal information and share that out with third-parties, often for advertising purposes. We discovered that Romantic AI sent out 24,354 ad trackers within one minute of use. That is a LOT of trackers (for reference, most apps we reviewed sent out a couple hundred trackers). Now, not all these trackers are necessarily bad. Some might be for legitimate reasons like subscription services. However, we did notice that at least one tracker seemed to be sending data to Russia, whose privacy laws aren't necessarily as strong as those elsewhere.

So, probably requests to third parties?

> Russia, whose privacy laws aren't necessarily as strong as those elsewhere.

Are they somehow worse than the non-existent ones we have in the US?

Also there's the "at least one tracker", which is out of 24,500+ trackers, making it even more insignificant. But they just had to mention it, as it's a popular baddie to single out.

and what exactly was sent? Sending personal information is much different than sending what pages you opened on the site (view counter).

Sometimes just seeing what pages you open on a site is extremely revealing personal information. If what they were collecting wasn't meaningful they wouldn't be bothering to collect it.