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For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

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Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#151

Post by deskr »

eco wrote: post #17

The CTO of Mozilla just posted on /r/firefox about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

First there's a justification based on current anti-tracking system being bypassed:

> "there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures"

Then:

> We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this

Given Meta's track record with scooping up just about any personal data they can find, it's pretty obvious that this is just going to be yet another datapoint in Meta's collection.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#152

Post by Klonoar »

phicoh wrote: post #145
Klonoar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for privacy or they don’t care. Or the third option: they feel the tradeoff of HN & co's criticism style is not a big deal in the end. Criticism of Mozilla in general is very warranted right now, but the way(s) in which everyone is doing so just feels very out of touch with the act…

Firefox market share is going down. One reason is that the people who would be promoting Firefox aren't. Personally I feel mostly ashamed to admit I'm using Firefox. In theory Firefox is great. In practice they coming up with new ways to treat their core user base badly.

> One reason is that the people who would be promoting Firefox aren't.

Individual promotion of Firefox worked very well when the browser(s) it was trying to displace were effectively frozen in time.

Chrome (et al) and Safari are not those browsers. The average user isn't going to get a markedly different experience by switching to Firefox.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#153

Post by latexr »

Klonoar wrote: post #101
latexr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. The user outcry was utterly predictable from even before the first web article was out. The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for pri…

> The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for privacy or they don’t care. Or the third option: they feel the tradeoff of HN & co's criticism style is not a big deal in the end. Criticism of Mozilla in general is very warranted right now, but the way(s) in which everyone is doing so just feels very out of touch with the act…

> Or the third option: they feel the tradeoff of HN & co's criticism style is not a big deal in the end.

That’s the second option: they don’t care.

> This thread in general feels like it leaves Mozilla no room to experiment

If you you’re going to experiment with something that’s going to cause this amount of backlash (and my criticism is that they didn’t take the obvious reaction into account), you show a dialog on first run that tells you what the feature is, perhaps include a “Learn More” link, and have an option to accept or deny. You can even have the former as the default. And do it in your betas first.

Would that still cause some backlash? Possibly. But it would’ve been significantly milder and you would have seen a lot more defence of Mozilla for not doing without asking.

Mozilla in particular is frequently pulling crap like this and getting flak for it. They have to constantly apologise and back track. After a while you’d expect they learned something.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#154

Post by doix »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #73
doix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the DRM is coming from Google, I'm sure they'll take that into consideration when designing it. Feels ripe for an anti-trust lawsuit, but IANAL so who knows.

With that logic, wouldn't Widevine DRM already be ripe for an antitrust lawsuit? Genuine question.

When I wrote the comment I was imagining Google using the tech as a moat to stop other search engines from indexing DRM protected content. I guess if they shared it and "all" search engines could index the content, it would probably be fine? I'm guessing that's why Widevine is "fine".

But like I said, I'm not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#155

Post by mrweasel »

dpwm wrote: post #22

The article links to Mozilla’s press release / blog entry about the acquisition of Anonym [0]. It’s pretty dystopian reading. The last three paragraphs and the summary of Anonym are more worrying than anything else I’ve read on this so far: > This acquisition marks a significant step in addressing the urgent need for privacy-preserving advertising solutions. By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with An…

The whole acquiring Anonym thing is almost guaranteed to go wrong. Either Mozilla just wasted a lot of money buying the company as it fails to be profitable or privacy will be eroded as Mozilla starts profiting from ad sales.

The companies buying ads aren't keen on privacy, at least not if it comes at the cost of optimizing sales, so I don't see anyone but small "do good" niche companies would buy into what Anonym is selling. Alternatively Mozilla will make money and start relaxing privacy restriction in order to extract even greater profits. I don't see them stopping half-way. The Mozilla leadership has again and again shown that they do not understand their user base.

Firefox is a great browser, but so it all Chromium based browsers. Mozilla apparently never considered why someone might stick with or switch to Firefox, when Chrome, Edge, Safari and other browsers do the exact same thing, sometimes perhaps better. I really want to ask the Mozilla CTO and upper management what they think their product is, because I got a in increasing hunch that Firefox isn't the first thing that would come across their lips.

Personally, right now the only reason I'm not switching to something like Vivaldi is my desire to ensure that rendering engines beyond Blink is represented in statistics.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#156

Post by Sammi »

tgv wrote: post #104
DaoVeles wrote: post #31

So where can I donate to Ladybird browser development? Before anyone tries to respond with it. It is https://donorbox.org/ladybird

Don't hold your breath. It takes ages to develop a browser that's as fast as Firefox. CSS and JS are no joke.

Ladybird more than doubled their js performane in five months between january and may and are now about 2x as slow as Safari: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1790098727081836697

Things are progressing faster than you'd think.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#157

Post by n_ary »

latexr wrote: post #87
eco wrote: post #17

The CTO of Mozilla just posted on /r/firefox about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

> It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. The user outcry was utterly predictable from even before the first web article was out. The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for pri…

Lets be honest, the number of HNish folks running Firefox is insignificant, compared to number of people using Firefox because their friends recommended it. So even if lets say 1% of the users(HN and similar folks) perform an outcry and go ahead disabling it, the other 99% of the people will still be a huge moat of data. These strategies(though I am willing to give Mozilla the benefit of doubt), had been played out many times, "ops we did this ... emergency update to fix it ... we are releasing this now officially, agree to our terms if you want to continue ... you can always opt-out ... slow boiling frog metaphore ... this is now permanent with the option to disable is gone and forgotten about".

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#158

Post by [deleted] »

leshenka wrote: post #146
prox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really need to start adding windows as a build target at some near point in the future. As a webdev, that’s the only way I can convince the public to switch.

It's already too hard to convince public to switch from chrome to another chromium browser or firefox and you're talking about switching to browser that is at least several years away from feature parity

[deleted]

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#159

Post by Sammi »

prox wrote: post #37
DaoVeles wrote: post #31

So where can I donate to Ladybird browser development? Before anyone tries to respond with it. It is https://donorbox.org/ladybird

They really need to start adding windows as a build target at some near point in the future. As a webdev, that’s the only way I can convince the public to switch.

They want to be able to run more websites well before they invite the unwashed masses from windows XD

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#160

Post by prox »

master-lincoln wrote: post #83
prox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really need to start adding windows as a build target at some near point in the future. As a webdev, that’s the only way I can convince the public to switch.

Maybe Ladybird can be a good reason to convince the "public" to switch away from Windows in the near future

That would be a great day. Unfortunately the culture of Linux is still too much walled garden, not in the Apple-like commercial sense, but in the tech culture kind of way. We need a way to embrace the public without losing what makes Linux great (to hack it to your own specifications)
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