Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road.
Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motivate people to switch away. So I think they should try out some new interesting ideas in the hope that some of them take off. Now, I don't think this is the feature to do that, but I won't criticize them for trying.
> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment
They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.
If you ever figure out a bulletproof solution to "just taking the money and building a good product/company without any technical debt and organizational cruft", please do share your results – this would be somewhat valuable for humanity!
Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.
Sadly Firefox already shows sponsored spammy & clickbaity "articles" on the default new tab page which always makes me cringe whenever I see it on other pcs.
Capitalist organizations, even nonprofits, incentive moving money to the top. Mozilla has the same kind of cancer that Wikimedia has documented. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla is not.
> Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links.
Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.
Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?
I would respect the announcement more if they just came out and said it - "we need cash to keep running and Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data. Sorry folks."
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
I still use Firefox because I'd like there to be more than one web browser in the world, but boy oh boy they're trying as hard as they can to get me to quit.
Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.
I use both Chrome and Firefox. Either it will reaffirm me that my preferred browser is indeed better, or I will find out what I have been missing out.
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
That still doesn't disable all telemetry from being sent. There's a whole slue of settings that you need to change in about:config and then there's still no guarantee.
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
> Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla [...] Rest assured, the way we gather these insights will always put user privacy first [...] Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox
Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
> Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
That requires users paying, something often suggested, but I have not heard of working commercially for anything where a competitor can supply a user as the product alternate. Privacy just isn't that valuable.
> Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
At the very least collection of non-anonymized data should be opt-in at most. So where is the problem?
I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based. I’d rather pay $5 a month and have no ads or tracking of any kind. They can even run a separate fork of Firefox or something for this purpose. If Firefox goes down Google will lock internet behind a DRM and we gonna need another rms or Torvalds to deliver us from this hell.
Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative? I’d rather pay a small fee not to have that.
Paid web browsers have been tried... Opera and OmniWeb probably the most notable examples, and it just doesn't seem like there's a workable market there.
Quite a few company and organization names are referenced. These include well-known ones like "Google" and "Microsoft", but also others that (at least to me) are far more obscure, such as "our third-party ad platform Kevel" and "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)".
Questionable words like "send", "sends", "sending", "share", "shares", and "sharing" also appear quite a few times.
More broadly, the notice is quite long. A software product that truly respects its users' privacy should have a short privacy policy, mainly because it isn't collecting data to begin with, it isn't sending data to third parties, and so forth.
I know some people will claim that the data collection and sending that Firefox does is somehow acceptable because some of it can be disabled, or because it might be less than what other browsers do. I don't buy into those arguments. A privacy-respecting browser would have users opt in to enable any functionality that might transmit user data, or just not even include such functionality at all by default (it would have to be voluntarily added via an extension, for example).
Reading just the blog post... these feel like useless metrics. Why do you care what percentage of your users are searching about animals. What do you possibly have to gain from this? Are they planning to introduce animal-based features?
And if it's not for their own metrics, but to sell... who's going to buy? Facebook tracking pixels and other statistics cookies are so much more valuable that this kind of data
I suspect it is mostly for selling things like default search engine and ads via Firefox Suggest. Some search categories are far more valuable than others for ads.
I have all Firefox/Mozilla URLs blocked at network level. I get Firefox install/updates from a Linux repo. Firefox is constantly pounding my network attempting to dial home. Thank you maintainers for giving me privacy.
I was a chrome user for over a decade and just last year switched to Firefox when googles decision to just flat share my data with ad brokers and call it a security feature finally pushed me over the edge and I switched to Firefox.
I still think chrome is the better browser both in functionality and performance, but at least Firefox was 90-95% of the way there, and respected my desire to not sell my data.
While this in of itself isn’t super egregious and has an easy opt out, what alternatives are there? I know there’s a bunch of chrome clones, but at that point why not just use raw chromium?
I don't even want my browser to support searching from the browser UI. If I want to send information to Google I'll visit their web page directly. I don't want to do it by a misclick.
It's surprisingly difficult to disable searching from the browser UI in Firefox. Firefox insists you have at least one search engine enabled at all times. The best option I know of is to set the undocumented setting "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to "true" in about:config, which enables an "Add" button in the Search preferences for adding custom search engines. You can then add a fake search engine on localhost that will always fail, and set this to be the only enabled search engine.
I achieved this by turning off a handful of config options for the address bar's suggestions; setting the search input to be separate from the address bar, and hiding it via Customize Toolbar.
There are a bunch of about:config changes you can make to prevent searching from the address bar. I follow that up by going through and just deleting nearly every string with a URL in it.
I miss when Firefox was this forward thinking project to make a better browser with a better UI. It’s similar to what happened to Canonical with Ubuntu. Both projects are extremely solid, and are easy to recommend, but neither has been pushing the envelope in a long time.
nobody knows how to read a room like the Mozilla folks. They know quite a few Firefox users hate telemetry with passion yet they always go back at it like it does not matter.
Oblivious HTTP is such a joke. The idea that an "independent organization" is your "partner" is a non-starter for me. How can you put those words in the same sentence? And then base the entire security of the whole feature on this premise?
I'm unclear about what search data they're collecting. Are they only talking about searches done through the omnibar, or are they including searches done by navigating to a search engine website and using that?
If the categories were things like "using search as the most convenient way to find a well-known website", "entering a term that's likely to appear in a news headline", and "asking a fully-formed question", I'd find the claim that this is about ways to make a better "browser experience" more convincing.
Yeah, this is the rub of it. I don’t want my browser to know about me. It’s not necessary. What are they gonna do, release a gaming-aesthetic browser like Opera did? Can’t this data be gleaned some most definitely not identifiable way like download number for particular platforms (“hey, we’re getting a lot of use on Steam Deck”) or something?
Mozilla is supposed to be better than this. I don’t really see anywhere else to go though if you want a web experience that works out of the box (non-free codecs and the like).
One thing that annoys me more than data collection is corporations pretending they do it for my benefit while "respecting my privacy." Stop with the gaslighting, it's absolutely insufferable.
Not to mention, the way the text is written makes me think it's ai generated and that makes it somehow even worse.
This. I invite everyone to go and look at the amount settings that must be turned OFF in Windows 10/11, Firefox, Chrome, whatever app from companies that claim to respect user privacy. For Windows it is literally dozens of toggles, and unsoliticed apps. Then there are the so called security features like malware scanning of URLs/file downloads, etc. Then the DNS replacements which, ya know, still see the URLs that you are asking for.
Every company that claims to respect your privacy is full of shit. There is too much money to made in not respecting it and this is the sole reason that they exist.
Turning off telemetry has always been easy in Firefox settings. If I'm reading it correctly, the same checkbox we've all be clicking off for years now also disables this too same as always.
Thank you Mozilla for categorising me for my own good, really appreciate the effort I need to put in to try and shut it down.
'By the way, these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early Christian communities that settled into this country mean it. That for a witches own good one had to dunk her repeatedly in water. Now we have come a long way since then haven’t we[?]'
How can Mozilla guarantee some privacy? Well, they would be using separation of content and the source. The content is "broad categories" of search queries. They take your query, match it to a category (this is important, because it has to be local matching to make sense), encrypt it with the public key and send it to a broker. The broker knows where it is coming from, but not what it says. The broker then forward to Mozilla, which decrypts it with their private key.
I don't see a problem as long as there's not enough bytes of information that can infer a person. Aggregating the data in the client would allow this, so I see some kind of time shifting to protect the activity patterns.
I still can't get search in my own bookmarks most of the time, because they pushed bookmark tags hard, then have not implemented them on mobile after a decade. But at least they have a state-of-the-art snooping mechanism...
Historically it was always interesting and quite challenging legal work, reconciling some things a bit like this with privacy, lawful intercept and anti-remote-exploitation-tool (anti-trojan) laws, especially in Europe (think: the cookie rule, which goes beyond cookies and PII). Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
> Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
I think its possible that the laws are still being violated, but good luck suing companies like MS or Google as an individual. Governments won't go after them because their spy agencies love the constant stream of data they can collect from it.
That says more about the web developers that you know than it does about Firefox.
Its anecdotal I know, but would have to say that I know more web devs who use Firefox as their daily driver (or use more than one browser), than those who use just Safari or Chrome only. The better web developers (better able to solve bugs, and write less error prone code) are the ones who don't use Chrome for everything.
Come on, Mozilla. I just want a browser. I type in an address, the browser shows me the page. You need money? Let me donate to Firefox so I don't have to continuously opt out of crap like this.
Why is the web browser try to act like SNS web service? You are an user agent for SNS web service, not the SNS itself. Now be a good boy and fetch a SNS web page like a good little dog.
Maybe this is okay to help support it but only if there is a clear modal dialog asking users to consider donating or consider staying opted in. But a default opt in is deceptive.
So I guess they're building their own index, just like Brave, Perplexity, Exa, and others. A much smaller arms race that seems to be going under the radar of most folks.
"Mozilla Connect is a collaborative space for ideas, feedback, and discussions that will help shape future product releases. Whether you’re a longtime Mozilla fan or new to our products—welcome! This community is for you. Please use this space to share ideas, give constructive feedback, and participate in meaningful conversations so we can work together to build a better internet"
Whoever is writing these press releases for Firefox needs to reconsider their style. By this point in the product cycle, the only people left using Firefox are sophisticated enough to read through this level of corporate bullshit. Either take "privacy first" seriously or take it out of the mission statement, but don't piss on our leg and call it rain.
As far as I can tell, this is about collecting aggregate data - they say at the country level - for example "U.S. users search a lot more for 'government' but less for 'education' than Mexican ones". This particular initiative doesn't seem to be about profiling individuals. And, of course, you can turn it off (even if you're not in a country covered by the GDPR).
If you want to do some kind of high-level data collection, this seems like a fairly ethical way of doing it? It's certainly better by miles than what all of chrome, android and edge have been pushing recently.
I have firefox suggest turned off on my machine (at least the one I have firefox as my main browser on), but that's just me.
The ethical way of doing this is opt in. It could be done like Debian's Popularity Contest[0], where you're offered a chance to install the data collection software, with the default being don't install. Firefox could do this with an extension.
Because it's inherently anti-consumer (not something that anyone would voluntarily opt into) and the EU would have their balls in vices instantaneously?
Maybe we should just go back to the 1990s where we just pay a one time fee to buy a piece software and own it forever? Without any data collection, without constant enshittification, without endless ads? Buy it, get a couple of yeard worth of security updates, and be done with it.
It's clear that libre browsers have failed. They are not sustainable. They are too big, too complex, and apparently only two organizations are really capable of keeping one going. One is an ad company, the other is a patsy for the ad company.
I don't see a way out of this that is at all sustainable.
The main reason I use Firefox is because it lets you deactivate search suggestions and the "awesome bar" will suggest only from history and bookmarks. Not having to go through a search engine for basic navigation is a killer feature, and better for the planet. Chrome does not let you do that for obvious reasons.
Now I am afraid of enshittification, that they will try to shove search suggestions one day and hide/remove the option to deactivate them.
Title feels a little bit misleading - they're not collecting 'categorised search data' so much as 'categorising searches and then collecting an aggregate of only the categories.'
I'm not entirely sure how to phrase it better while keeping it pithy but the current wording reads to me like they're collecting the searches as well as the categories, and they deliberately aren't doing that.
(I entirely understand that some people will reasonably have an issue with what they -are- doing, but it's at least worth understanding what that actually is before deciding whether you're one of them :)
How does having a browsing experience imply being a product?
Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser!
Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they alienate a vocal part of their user base; when they don't, their software drifts further and further from what users actually want and need.
That's just not feasible for the vast majority of people. Being constantly behind on security updates is a sound recipe for losing your personal data unless there's nothing you care about on the machine you're using.
Every time I hear "anonymous data", I think of that time AOL published anonymized search logs (for academic research). The anonymization was negligent, and an NYT reporter de-anonymized and tracked down one of the users with the local & personal info present in the search queries.
> We’re ramping up our efforts to enhance search experience by developing new features like Firefox Suggest, which provides recommended online content that corresponds to queries.
So, they need to collect data about my search habits so they can show me relevant ads in Firefox Suggest? At this point why do I even bother using Firefox? I seriously might as well just use Chromium.
Depends what you want. Chromium also has hooks back to Google so if you are really data conscious you’ll need to look to something like ungoogled-chromium.
romanows|1 year ago
Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
aquova|1 year ago
pquki4|1 year ago
They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.
I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.
lxgr|1 year ago
BadHumans|1 year ago
ddalex|1 year ago
Obviously not. It's very difficult to make people understand something when their jobs depend on them not understanding it.
not2b|1 year ago
sunaookami|1 year ago
immibis|1 year ago
jasonlotito|1 year ago
Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.
Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?
wavemode|1 year ago
kevincox|1 year ago
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
lxgr|1 year ago
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
jasonlotito|1 year ago
More importantly: "Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data"
Citation needed here. Your head isn't good enough.
fallingsquirrel|1 year ago
I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
roughly|1 year ago
falcolas|1 year ago
autoexec|1 year ago
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
omoikane|1 year ago
I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).
medstrom|1 year ago
atomicfiredoll|1 year ago
"Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide [0] on how to adjust your settings."
---
1. Click the [hamburger menu button] and select Settings.
2. Select the Privacy & Security panel.
3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.
4. Check or uncheck the box next to Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...
krono|1 year ago
Even if you follow those steps you listed there and uncheck all those boxes you're shown in the standard settings pages, then Firefox will just continue to send out 'pings' when you interact with certain elements in the browser interface. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mozilla is like one of those politicians that just won't stop yapping about traditional conservative family values, who is later found to have several extramarital children and numerous affairs with same-sex partners themselves.
yabatopia|1 year ago
stronglikedan|1 year ago
stevenicr|1 year ago
Note says it takes 30 days for them to remove your data history.
I wonder if pihole or similar could just block the dns for this crap.
CaptainOfCoit|1 year ago
Wouldn't actually putting "user privacy first" lead to the conclusion that gathering insights like this shouldn't be done on a opt-out basis and instead be opt-in, at the very least?
Personally, I'd see "privacy first" as not needing to sell any user data at all, in the first place, but we're clearly beyond that already.
SllX|1 year ago
MattGaiser|1 year ago
That requires users paying, something often suggested, but I have not heard of working commercially for anything where a competitor can supply a user as the product alternate. Privacy just isn't that valuable.
cubefox|1 year ago
At the very least collection of non-anonymized data should be opt-in at most. So where is the problem?
beretguy|1 year ago
Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alternative? I’d rather pay a small fee not to have that.
Marsymars|1 year ago
xnyan|1 year ago
That's not the world we live in today?
JohnFen|1 year ago
Software subscriptions are a hard "no" for me. Even if I loved literally everything else about Firefox, if they did this I'd have to stop using it.
fifteen1506|1 year ago
I do donate on average €2/month for various projects, though.
mr_machine|1 year ago
medstrom|1 year ago
VancouverMan|1 year ago
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
Quite a few company and organization names are referenced. These include well-known ones like "Google" and "Microsoft", but also others that (at least to me) are far more obscure, such as "our third-party ad platform Kevel" and "AdMarketplace (a third-party referral platform)".
Questionable words like "send", "sends", "sending", "share", "shares", and "sharing" also appear quite a few times.
More broadly, the notice is quite long. A software product that truly respects its users' privacy should have a short privacy policy, mainly because it isn't collecting data to begin with, it isn't sending data to third parties, and so forth.
I know some people will claim that the data collection and sending that Firefox does is somehow acceptable because some of it can be disabled, or because it might be less than what other browsers do. I don't buy into those arguments. A privacy-respecting browser would have users opt in to enable any functionality that might transmit user data, or just not even include such functionality at all by default (it would have to be voluntarily added via an extension, for example).
AzzyHN|1 year ago
And if it's not for their own metrics, but to sell... who's going to buy? Facebook tracking pixels and other statistics cookies are so much more valuable that this kind of data
kevincox|1 year ago
binkHN|1 year ago
How about a write-up on how Firefox plans to stay competitive and integrate/innovate on some of the best features from competing browsers?
pixxel|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
multimoon|1 year ago
I still think chrome is the better browser both in functionality and performance, but at least Firefox was 90-95% of the way there, and respected my desire to not sell my data.
While this in of itself isn’t super egregious and has an easy opt out, what alternatives are there? I know there’s a bunch of chrome clones, but at that point why not just use raw chromium?
mrob|1 year ago
It's surprisingly difficult to disable searching from the browser UI in Firefox. Firefox insists you have at least one search engine enabled at all times. The best option I know of is to set the undocumented setting "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to "true" in about:config, which enables an "Add" button in the Search preferences for adding custom search engines. You can then add a fake search engine on localhost that will always fail, and set this to be the only enabled search engine.
crtasm|1 year ago
I think these were the most important:
lagniappe|1 year ago
YES! My friend, you have found my holy grail, thank you
autoexec|1 year ago
int_19h|1 year ago
elaborate4013|1 year ago
jdlyga|1 year ago
wopwops|1 year ago
abcd_f|1 year ago
pixxel|1 year ago
ekianjo|1 year ago
fifteen1506|1 year ago
remram|1 year ago
JohnFen|1 year ago
chatmasta|1 year ago
Why isn’t this opt-in? Seems to give away the plot.
mtmail|1 year ago
"This helps us [...] providing a browsing experience that is more tailored to your needs"
How would my browsing experience be different in any of the categories? Unless it's about showing me ads yet again.
mjw1007|1 year ago
If the categories were things like "using search as the most convenient way to find a well-known website", "entering a term that's likely to appear in a news headline", and "asking a fully-formed question", I'd find the claim that this is about ways to make a better "browser experience" more convincing.
SoftTalker|1 year ago
cflewis|1 year ago
Mozilla is supposed to be better than this. I don’t really see anywhere else to go though if you want a web experience that works out of the box (non-free codecs and the like).
poszlem|1 year ago
Not to mention, the way the text is written makes me think it's ai generated and that makes it somehow even worse.
exitzer0|1 year ago
Every company that claims to respect your privacy is full of shit. There is too much money to made in not respecting it and this is the sole reason that they exist.
parrellel|1 year ago
mst|1 year ago
UberFly|1 year ago
callroomlamp|1 year ago
UberFly|1 year ago
autoexecbat|1 year ago
itscrush|1 year ago
cess11|1 year ago
'By the way, these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early Christian communities that settled into this country mean it. That for a witches own good one had to dunk her repeatedly in water. Now we have come a long way since then haven’t we[?]'
<https://rickroderick.org/106-nietzsche-knowledge-and-belief-...>
braiamp|1 year ago
I don't see a problem as long as there's not enough bytes of information that can infer a person. Aggregating the data in the client would allow this, so I see some kind of time shifting to protect the activity patterns.
remram|1 year ago
Timber-6539|1 year ago
flipbrad|1 year ago
autoexec|1 year ago
I think its possible that the laws are still being violated, but good luck suing companies like MS or Google as an individual. Governments won't go after them because their spy agencies love the constant stream of data they can collect from it.
err4nt|1 year ago
hostyle|1 year ago
Its anecdotal I know, but would have to say that I know more web devs who use Firefox as their daily driver (or use more than one browser), than those who use just Safari or Chrome only. The better web developers (better able to solve bugs, and write less error prone code) are the ones who don't use Chrome for everything.
parasti|1 year ago
ezoe|1 year ago
Woodi|1 year ago
blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago
ribhu97|1 year ago
proactivesvcs|1 year ago
https://connect.mozilla.org/
When you make a comment here, do a quick search beforehand to check the topic doesn't already exist, and do abide by the spirit of the guidelines.
roughly|1 year ago
michelangelo|1 year ago
manifoldgeo|1 year ago
red_admiral|1 year ago
If you want to do some kind of high-level data collection, this seems like a fairly ethical way of doing it? It's certainly better by miles than what all of chrome, android and edge have been pushing recently.
I have firefox suggest turned off on my machine (at least the one I have firefox as my main browser on), but that's just me.
mrob|1 year ago
[0] https://popcon.debian.org/
Fervicus|1 year ago
thepaulmcbride|1 year ago
abcd_f|1 year ago
doublepg23|1 year ago
resource_waste|1 year ago
Lots of ads.
Its just a glimpse into the future of this company.
We are past the peak.
ravivyas|1 year ago
PreInternet01|1 year ago
I'd pay a monthly recurring EU$ 0(.|,)99 for that!
elric|1 year ago
It's clear that libre browsers have failed. They are not sustainable. They are too big, too complex, and apparently only two organizations are really capable of keeping one going. One is an ad company, the other is a patsy for the ad company.
I don't see a way out of this that is at all sustainable.
cassepipe|1 year ago
Now I am afraid of enshittification, that they will try to shove search suggestions one day and hide/remove the option to deactivate them.
mst|1 year ago
I'm not entirely sure how to phrase it better while keeping it pithy but the current wording reads to me like they're collecting the searches as well as the categories, and they deliberately aren't doing that.
(I entirely understand that some people will reasonably have an issue with what they -are- doing, but it's at least worth understanding what that actually is before deciding whether you're one of them :)
unknown|1 year ago
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daft_pink|1 year ago
usernamed7|1 year ago
bloopernova|1 year ago
I don't want to be treated as a product, sold to data brokers without my knowledge.
My browsing experience is already tailored to me by my own actions.
I guess I'll be migrating to LibreWolf.
lxgr|1 year ago
Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser!
Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they alienate a vocal part of their user base; when they don't, their software drifts further and further from what users actually want and need.
unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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jimbob45|1 year ago
spiffytech|1 year ago
Every time I hear "anonymous data", I think of that time AOL published anonymized search logs (for academic research). The anonymization was negligent, and an NYT reporter de-anonymized and tracked down one of the users with the local & personal info present in the search queries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release
https://web.archive.org/web/20130404175032/http://www.nytime...
unknown|1 year ago
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lordofgibbons|1 year ago
So, they need to collect data about my search habits so they can show me relevant ads in Firefox Suggest? At this point why do I even bother using Firefox? I seriously might as well just use Chromium.
beretguy|1 year ago
Before you leave please give LibreWolf a shot. It’s a modified Firefox with “spying/tracking/etc” disabled.
https://librewolf.net/
cflewis|1 year ago
CaptainOfCoit|1 year ago
bdzr|1 year ago
add-sub-mul-div|1 year ago
groovecoder|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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formerly_proven|1 year ago
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d_503|1 year ago
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rabbits_2002|1 year ago
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Andrex|1 year ago
Wish there were an Android version with bookmark sync but watchagonnado
unknown|1 year ago
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callalex|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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yborg|1 year ago
braiamp|1 year ago
mrbluecoat|1 year ago
lordofgibbons|1 year ago