yoasif @ yoasif @fedia.io

Posts

91

Comments

116

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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I'm a little confused about where we disagree - but it might make it simpler to clarify that I said "shared", not sold. That seems to be exactly what they are saying in the privacy notices from both 2017 and today.

Whether it was sold and what that entailed isn't something we're going to be able to know without Mozilla telling us.

Did you see that the privacy policy was updated to use Technical & Interaction data to "suggest relevant content"?

It's a package deal.

I actually hadn't checked the documentation (serves me right, of course), but I can't see where they are up front about it:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-tab#w_data-and-privacy https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared

When you view or click on a sponsored shortcut, Firefox sends anonymized technical data to our partner through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The code for this proxy service is available on GitHub for interested technical audiences. This data does not include any personally identifying information and is only shared when you click on a sponsored shortcut.

By default, when stories are recommended on your New Tab page, Firefox collects data on how often they appear and how many times they are clicked. This data is not linked to any technical or interaction information about you or your Firefox browser. You can learn more about the data we collect and opt out data collection if you prefer.

If you choose topics of interest to personalize your recommendations, the selected topics will be collected to improve the relevance of the recommended articles and sponsored content on your New Tab page. This information is also not associated with any technical or interaction data about you or your Firefox browser.

Do you see any reference here what we see today on the new Mozilla Privacy Notice that says that you can opt out of tracking for ads by disabling the "technical and interaction" data checkbox?

Well, to be clear it is ideas about "the Services", per the clause. Are you saying the clause says something it doesn't?

Not true, Firefox never overtook Internet Explorer.

This is fine and all if you have some low-end device without gapps, but... run Firefox Nightly. 😉

They likely need a monetization model in order to pay developers.

And then later I learned it was a cooperative effort, just not under the same name

Source?

They developed the "privacy sandbox" together.

Yeah that's not true.

You have to remember that sometimes when that shiny new CSS feature comes out, it is underspecced, with unhandled corner cases -- "just do what Chromium does" is not a standard -- or is it? Having multiple implementations of a spec prove that it is interoperable - without that, you might have a good spec, or you might have a spec that says "whatever Chrome does is what is expected". Not sure that is what we want from new CSS (or any) features.

The 2FA thing sounds like it's all on the Dropbox side if you are just entering a code you got from an authenticator app. The Google login issue may be a real issue -- did the Google login specifically work on another browser?

There is nothing about MV3 that stops you from improving things.

What about this stuff?

Uhh, that doesn't seem normal at all. Is this a default config? Any extensions in use?

Probably simpler to just "Forget" the site from the site's context menu in the history sidebar.

What are you a captcha?

"Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it's harder for users to investigate", which is clearly an inaccurate statement.

Why is it an inaccurate statement?

What user are you thinking of?

You really felt misled that it was harder to inspect? What makes you think I have the expertise to inspect this? I'm not even a user and I wouldn't know where to start to find the ad blocker within that tarball. Would you?

In any case, I clarified why it was harder to inspect - to me it felt obvious that being closed source made it harder to investigate. The fact that it is also shared source really has no bearing to the general observation, especially since we're talking about a 2GB tarball where I don't even know where to start. And I'm a pretty technical person.

How would a user easily investigate this vs. an open source browser?