God, you’re exhausting. They don’t sell the data. Get over it. The email left no room for ambiguity. You’re reaching so far it’s embarrassing. Are you really that jaded?

Reviving a long-dead thread for a relevant update, in a top-level post because you deleted all of your replies in the thread where it was relevant.

Mozilla did reply to my email asking for clarification on their Fakespot privacy policy, and whether they collect or sell user data, as we were discussing - though that reply took them four weeks. Their response in full:

“”" Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards, Mozilla “”"

The main difference to me is the lack of a profit motive, which is the primary driver of enshittification. The federation helps harden it against things like abusive admins, since it’s dead simple to jump ship to another instance in that case, but honestly that’s pretty secondary to me.

Notes in Google Keep will sync between mobile and web

Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.

Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.

Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

I hope that if Mozilla does fail someone takes over Firefox from them

I’m of course rooting for Mozilla, but if things do go sideways…

Please be Proton, please be Proton

And surely you know better than to assume Firefox’s own privacy policy is null and void because the privacy policy for a different, distinct product offered by the same company has some different terms in it? Regardless of what FakeSpot’s actual policy ends up being (I’m withholding judgement until they reply to my email), I can’t see it as anything other than disingenuous to imply that their policy in some way affects Firefox’s policy. Firefox does not sell user data, period.

I’m going with Mozilla on this one.

From the same privacy policy you linked:

I don’t personally understand the disconnect between the parts we each posted, but there is a clear disconnect regardless.

And, regardless, this applies to fakespot.com. Not Firefox. Not even slightly Firefox. Firefox unambiguously has nothing to do with selling user data.

Edit: I’ve also gone ahead and sent an email to the address at the bottom of the policy asking for clarification on the issue.

Four weeks later edit: They replied to my email. Here is their response:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards,
Mozilla

I think it’s probably a combination of both. There’s an astroturfing campaign going on somewhere, just not on Lemmy, which is overall too small and insignificant to target. But astroturfing works - it creates the echo chambers you’re talking about, it creates apathy. Most people just read headlines, not even the comments. You read a bad story about Mozilla once a week and you’ll start to internalize it - eventually your opinion of Mozilla will drop, justified or not, to the point where you’re willing to believe even the more heinous theories about it.

So you end up with a lot of people who’ve been fed a lot of misleading half-truths and even some outright lies, who are now getting angry enough about the situation they think is going on to start actively posting anti-Mozilla posts and comments on their own.

Your own 2023 article doesn’t say anything about policies allowing Mozilla to sell private data, and Mozilla’s own website openly and proudly claims they neither buy nor sell their users’ data.

And Anonym is a company purpose-created to try to transform the advertising industry into a more privacy-respecting industry. Its mission could not align more with Mozilla’s. They in particular developed PPA, the feature Firefox was getting so much bad press about last week - and which ended up being none of the things the dozens of articles posted about it claimed. It is, in fact, a complete non-factor when it comes to privacy risks, and its explicit purpose is to pivot the internet toward a significantly more private ecosystem.

There are lots of people claiming Mozilla is becoming an advertising company and is selling their users out. There’s some misleading evidence that even makes that superficially appear true. But it’s false.

The fact that Mozilla hasn’t talked much about ad blockers since then is, I think, significant.

When have they talked about ad blockers in the past, period? This is just a meaningless scare tactic. I don’t see them talking about arctic drilling either - should I be concerned?

From the same page you got your image from:

That’s not really what the issue is when people mention LibreWolf depends on Firefox. Its code will always be there, sure - but an abandoned browser is a soon-to-be-dead browser. Something as complex as Firefox needs constant updates to its security and engine, at a minimum, to keep it safe and functional. That’s all work that Mozilla does for LibreWolf, and it’s a significant enough burden that arguably no current fork of Firefox would be able to bear it. It’s apparently a burden even Microsoft wasn’t willing to bear anymore.

Who knows? The file that got incorrectly marked as collecting or transmitting data was named “googlesyndication_adsbygoogle.js”. I’m sure that’s a very reasonable guess for what a file with that name would do… in most add-ons. But like, obviously not in this one. My best guess is the reviewers have some type of tool that’s intended to help them find issues, it flagged the referenced files, and the reviewer either couldn’t or didn’t properly verify the files were actually issues.

For what it’s worth, Firefox is absolutely still the browser that doesn’t treat you like a piggy bank and has options to eliminate ads.

I agree that they should have replied, and that replying probably would have even fixed the mistake, but I also can’t find it in me to fault them in this situation. Getting those emails would have been both frustrating and insulting, and one of their messages on the linked GitHub page goes into the various stresses the situation puts them through.

I don’t agree that there’s enough evidence here to decide Mozilla’s actions were hostile/malicious - maybe if they were given a chance to fix things and still didn’t, but everyone makes mistakes. Incompetent, sure, malicious, not enough evidence.

My own reading of the situation on the developer’s GitHub is unfortunately that the review by Mozilla is indeed completely inaccurate in every way. No way to even read it as a “Each side has their own story” type of thing since they reproduce Mozilla’s emails verbatim. They seem just materially incorrect. The source files referenced by the emails are visible on the same GitHub account, along with their complete histories showing no changes at all - the issues referenced don’t and never did exist.

The only redeeming thing I can find is that the dev (ambiguously) seems to have never replied to the email from Mozilla about the issues, and so Mozilla was never made aware that there was an issue with the review that needed fixing. They seem to have done this because they perceived the process as hostile and not worth engaging with, which… fair, I guess.

(Not an actual, like, punching him in the head beatdown.)

Look, let’s not be picky here

Their acquisition of Anonym was all about acquiring the feature this article is about, PPA. Anonym created PPA. In fact Anonym seems to have been created for the explicit purpose of creating this privacy-respecting system as an alternative to cross-site tracking cookies. I see no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here.

Yeah - I’ve actually softened my own stance since I wrote that paragraph near the end, too, I just didn’t feel like editing a message that I claimed to have copy/pasted. While I still have no intention of enabling the feature in my install, that’s out of pure spite for anything that could conceivably help an advertiser somewhere, even if it isn’t at my expense. I do see value in the feature itself existing. While I think the industry is unlikely to abandon tracking cookies and swap to this system voluntarily, I could see certain governments eventually mandating such a change, if the feature proves robust enough.

I might even go as far as to agree that on-by-default is the better option for the feature’s chances of success - but for new installs. When new features are added to existing installs in updates, particularly if those features are in the “Privacy & Security” section of the settings page, it would probably be better practice to ask the user to pick an option on the first boot after updating.