Mozilla is such a confusing company, and I say this as a daily Firefox user.
How can you be claim to be serious about privacy when you partner with a startup to harvest complete browser histories? Makes no sense.
Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
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Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#42I don't get how this relates to Mozilla's mission, I especially don't understand how technologies that are core to their mission (open communication with Thunderbird, open identity with Persona) are left abandoned. I'm not offended by the extension, I'm more befuddled why they're wasting their time and money on something very few people want. My friends/social network are going to suggest cool stuff to read, not some…
Not once have I opened a blank browser and thought “Gee, I wish my browser could tell me what web site to go to!” I’m almost convinced that “getting opaque product recommendations” is almost never an end-user desired feature of any product. It is a company-desired feature because it lets the company market, promote and editorialize anything it wants to, under the guise of being helpful.
Users are supposed to tell computers what to do, not the other way around. I’m afraid that so much more R&D and innovation is happening in the area of computers telling humans what to do and it’s mildly scary.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#43We are at a time in history when we could benefit from reading _alternative_ points of view rather than remain trapped in our ideological bubbles.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel compelled to point out straight away that this is explicitly opt-in. Now. > The sky is not falling just because they're offering something like this locked behind two separate opt-in steps. They did the same scam with Pocket. Now, tell me how to disable that again?
Pocket doesn't send your browsing history to a third party; it all works locally.
It is my understanding that Pocket by default phones home with the articles recommended to you as well as your interaction with them on the new tab page.
Given that these recommendations are generated using your local browsing history they leak info. Based on your recommended articles they can determine what subset of the daily site set matches with your browsing history.
A more focused attack could purposely poison the daily site set with obscure bad site(s); any users that receive these recommendation should have some browsing history intersection with the bad sites.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#45Let's talk about the knee-jerk reaction we are all probably having right now: "Muh privacy!" It's hard not to have that reaction. A couple days ago there was a front page post on HN about the DNS-Over-HTTPS features that Mozilla is experimenting with. Mozilla has this storied history of community reactions. So perhaps we can all be forgiven for being on edge with Firefox. Our news feed makes it seem like Mozilla is o…
Yes I hold them to a higher standard and Mozilla is their own worst enemy. Off the top of my head I can think of
> german cliqz partnership/expirement
> Mr. Robot ad forced extension install
> Forcing Pocket into base Firefox
> Naive reassurances of Cloudflare's, an American company, privacy policy for DNS-Over-HTTPS
> Google Analytics on mozilla pages (can't run extensions on these domains)
>Obtuse refusal to change Screenshots UI elements to be less confusing (increase chance for user to upload to mozilla's cloud)
> Today's experiment of recreating Stumbleupon in the core browser including sharing your entire browser history with a third party
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#46I don't get how this relates to Mozilla's mission, I especially don't understand how technologies that are core to their mission (open communication with Thunderbird, open identity with Persona) are left abandoned. I'm not offended by the extension, I'm more befuddled why they're wasting their time and money on something very few people want. My friends/social network are going to suggest cool stuff to read, not some…
> My friends/social network are going to suggest cool stuff to read, not some startup's bot reading by browsing history.
Isn't that how we ended up with Facebook's ad targeting algorithms controlling most people's web experience? Running a cheap experiment testing how alternatives might work seems like important if you care about not having network effects giving a couple of companies significant control over the web.
> Chrome (and siblings) … and have significantly better performance.
That was never generally true and it really hasn't been accurate for the last year or two, where performance has been very competitive depending on what you're measuring.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The really mystifying part is that one of the key value propositions of Firefox is "here is a browser that respects your privacy," and yet Mozilla keeps flirting with bolting things on to Firefox that actively undermine that value proposition. They repeatedly sabotage the success of their only product! It's astounding.
It's too much to hope that products could just focus on doing what they do, and doing it well, rather than bodging on miscellaneous shit until it resembles the Homermobile. Build a browser. Implement the standards fully. Make it scream. That's your job.
I, for one, will not donate a cent until this happens.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#48I'm confused about a couple of things. First, the tech. So my browsing history is sent over the internet to a third party who comes up with recommendations via some magic opaque system? Can some recommendations be prioritized by how much you pay this third party? I have all sorts of questions about Laserlike's use of the data, but I guess I can dig for myself. Sure, you can say "well, don't use it" but this is more a…
this is the market working as intended.
search is overridden with advertising, corporate messaging, politics and other moneyed interests. in contrast, users are looking for authentic content and information. those two things are increasingly misaligned.
mozilla is experimenting with a new way for users to find what they want, rather than deferring to google et al. to deliver subpar user experiences.
it may work, it may not, but i’m glad they are trying.
(edit: i probably won’t try it any time soon, due to the privacy concerns voiced here and elsewhere. hopefully mozilla addresses those with a v.2 release and maybe i will try it then)
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#49I'm confused about a couple of things. First, the tech. So my browsing history is sent over the internet to a third party who comes up with recommendations via some magic opaque system? Can some recommendations be prioritized by how much you pay this third party? I have all sorts of questions about Laserlike's use of the data, but I guess I can dig for myself. Sure, you can say "well, don't use it" but this is more a…
this is the market working as intended. search is overridden with advertising, corporate messaging, politics and other moneyed interests. in contrast, users are looking for authentic content and information. those two things are increasingly misaligned. mozilla is experimenting with a new way for users to find what they want, rather than deferring to google et al. to deliver subpar user experiences. it may work, it m…
Nothing on the Laserlike website indicates how they plan to make money from their service, but I wouldn't bet on it not being overridden with advertising, corporate messaging, politics and other moneyed interests.
Re: Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance
#50I'm confused about a couple of things. First, the tech. So my browsing history is sent over the internet to a third party who comes up with recommendations via some magic opaque system? Can some recommendations be prioritized by how much you pay this third party? I have all sorts of questions about Laserlike's use of the data, but I guess I can dig for myself. Sure, you can say "well, don't use it" but this is more a…
Nick Nguyen's post on Context Graph¹ touches on the motivation, but in short, we think the health of the Web is threatened by existing players building experiences that, like a casino, you can link into easily, but which are deliberately difficult to navigate away from. For example, Instagram has historically restricted² which users are allowed to include external links in their posts. That harms the Open Web and concentrates power over what you can see and discover online.
On the other hand, if the browser itself can offer links that break out of those walls, then we can sidestep the existing filter bubbles and make the Web a more competitive, plural medium.
Per the announcement post³, if this proves useful, we'll look at alternative means of generating the recommendations; the current implementation (sharing history) is an opt-in shortcut while we figure out if recommendations are worth pursuing at all.
While we are searching for privacy-respecting ways that we can diversify Firefox's revenue, and recommendations could play into that, that's not what this experiment is testing. Further, we will not pursue this outside of Test Pilot if we can't do it in a way that's private and which adds genuine end-user value.
¹: https://medium.com/firefox-context-graph/context-graph-its-t...
²: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/instagram-will-now-let-cre...
³: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/08/07/firefox-offers-reco...