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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

#181

Post by closewith »

Klonoar wrote: post #144
pdimitar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also possible to disable it, it's not like you're trapped in it. Or so they say, in order to make people be OK with it. They might play the waiting game and in a year or two will make the setting not do anything and still collect / send data, hoping that by that time people have forgotten.

There is so much hypothetical-borderline-conspiracy-theory packed in to this single comment that I cannot find a charitable response. I'd be fine to continue the discussion if you can find a way to engage without assuming that the people who build one of the last checks on the open internet are somehow trying to maliciously invade your privacy.

The days of Mozilla having earned the benefit of the doubt are long gone for most people.

The person you replied to made a reasonable point and your response reads as defensive and dismissive. Do you have an interest in Mozilla we should know about?

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

#182

Post by V__ »

3l3ktr4 wrote: post #165
uyzstvqs wrote: post #134

What's dumb is that Firefox is not the freedom browser people think it is. Mozilla is a crappy organization. Firefox has extension signing, it's as restrictive as installing apps on iOS where only approved apps can be installed, without a setting to easily disable it. Mozilla can also remotely install extensions by default (opt out) called "experiments" or something. Their anti-tracking is purposefully weak because o…

>And Mozilla leadership is associated with radical left politics, just as an extra. Do you have proof for this? I'd be curious. I also fail to see how is that related to the collecting data by default thing. Is that a leftist thing now?

Maybe they mean this statement, however I don't see why their proposed changes are radical.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

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

#183

Post by ho_schi »

temporarely wrote: post #162

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?

Yep. One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL. They didn’t tried like programmers hack against bad things which never works in long term.

The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM.

We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we don’t like tracking, the solution is a law. But the EU Cookie-Directive of failed? Because malicious compliance, they made a business case out of it instead of ending it (cookies for logins are fine). And if we want public APIs, local computing and open-source the solutions are laws.

The FSF uses the law :)

Let us go a step further, change it.

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

#184

Post by closewith »

pdimitar wrote: post #109
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…

> It's also possible to disable it, it's not like you're trapped in it. Or so they say, in order to make people be OK with it. They might play the waiting game and in a year or two will make the setting not do anything and still collect / send data, hoping that by that time people have forgotten.

They don't need to. Defaults are retained by the majority of users, who will never know about this change.

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

#185

Post by berkes »

3l3ktr4 wrote: post #170

I wonder why they claim they need this... Tor seems to be doing fine as an organization without collecting user data? Why maintaining Firefox is much more expensive? I guess the codebase for Firefox is much larger and in the end Tor is a fork of Firefox, right? So maybe they do need much more resources? Not to say I'm not disappointed with Mozilla once again.

Tor is (was?) heavily subsidised by secret services in a.o. the US.

> likewise, agencies within the U.S. government variously fund Tor (the U.S. State Department, the National Science Foundation, and – through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself partially funded Tor until October 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28network%29?wprov=sfla1

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

#186

Post by Regencl420 »

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.

[dead]

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

#187

Post by latexr »

david_draco wrote: post #136
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…

> What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google. - Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary. - No one wants to buy for a browser. -…

> How should browser development be funded?

One of the most common Mozilla complaints I see on the web is that you cannot fund Firefox development directly. People want to give money to it, but cannot.

Which makes sense, I guess. Anecdotally, Mozilla is by far the company I know with the most vocal users that get completely ignored.

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

#188

Post by bondarchuk »

berkes wrote: post #173
temporarely wrote: post #162

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?

How would that legal "protection" work in practice? What would it protect against? Who would it protect? What you say sounds reasonable. And I'm not trying to say "well, it's impossible because of some current status quo", because we could change that. What I'm trying to say is that we need this "industry" to work out the practicalities. Otherwise we are "protected" in a same way the GDPR protects us against 3rd part…

We don't necessarily need the ad industry to work out the practicalities if we simply do away with the whole ad industry. We could quite easily outlaw receiving payments from a third party in exchange for displaying information to your users.

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

#189

Post by berkes »

sph wrote: post #34

What do you expect from a company indirectly owned and controlled by Google money? I can't wait for Ladybird to get good, in a decade realistically, swimming against a massive current of Google pushing its unstandardised nonsense on Chrome, and web developers jumping on the bandwagon, making web standards more and more complex by the day so no one ever is able to catch up. You can add to the dead internet theory the…

They aren't owned nor controlled by Google. And certainly not directly.

I presume you refer to the fact that most income of Mozilla comes from Google paying a fee to have their search be the default. While that is worrysome, it's not control nor ownership. Let alone direct control. At most it gives Google leverage.

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

#190

Post by mort96 »

lopis wrote: post #28
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...

I think this line is very important: > First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. It's very likely that this arms race will lead to DRM in web publications and video feeds (which Google is already experimenting with).

This move does not stop the arms race. Non-anonymous data is still better for the ad industry. Why give that up?
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