The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.
But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”
You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.
Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.
As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.
At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?
Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don’t know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can’t protect you from.
It shouldn’t be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It’s not like their marketing team isn’t aware of the fact most people don’t know any better.
It’s in their best interests, too, because it doesn’t matter how many times you say “we provide privacy not anonymity”, the headlines are a bad look.
From their Twitter:
If you wonder why we can’t update the VLC on Android version, it’s because Google refuses to let us update:
- either we give them our private signing keys,
- or we drop support for Android TV before API-30, and all our users on TV API<30 can’t get fixes.
It’s not much, just dozens of millions of people use Android TV before Android-11…
Maybe we should tell users to buy new TVs? #electronicWaste
I can’t speak to why they’re not updating on FDroid but seeing as how it’s much more difficult to get people to use FDroid on Android TV, I don’t think it will help them with that issue anyway.
Just in general, if any app or platform or website prompts you to allow them access to something out of the blue, and there’s no obvious benefit or reason why you would need that, don’t grant it. It is on them to adequately explain what it is they’re asking for and why.
This “improve your experience” bullshit is Microsoft’s default reason for letting them do anything. It means exactly nothing. Go to Microsoft to check documentation or ask them to explain thoroughly. Never take that line as an adequate explanation.
Hell, chances are, if you allowed that, you’d probably see another pop up in a couple days or so saying “Ya know, why not just use Edge? Think of how much more improved the experience could be.”
A good 80% of the shit Microsoft notifies you about nowadays is either a disguised ad or some sort of campaign to pressure you into their ecosystem (effectively ads). If the thing is working, you can ignore most everything else.
All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.
On a fundamental level, this “choose your voters” thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user’s knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.
There’s just so many avenues for abuse here, and it’s disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.
In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it’s not what people expect. But votes are very public.
Which de-incentivizes voting, choking off the thing needed to aggregate the content. Kind of underlining the problem with the votes being public.
Can we get one for this too?
I’m tired of seeing devs on Discords and Slack channels jerk themselves raw with it every time they get any kind of negative feedback whatsoever on a change they pushed.
Alternatively, just start changing passwords, regardless if they’re in the breach or not. Prioritize the ones with financial information, then the ones with personal info, the ones you visit frequently versus some shitty site you visited once that made you make an account back in 2011, etc.
I know that’s a lot of accounts for some people but you don’t have to do them all at once. Go reset a password or two on a site today at lunch. Then do another one tomorrow. And a few the next day.
I actually remember reading about an app or feature on a password manager that would do something like this. Rather than bark at you to reset 100 different accounts at once, it would just give you 1 or 2 random accounts a day to go reset the password on.
Too many people only care about the openweb or shitty companies in the comments. They have no fucking willpower, no patience, and no follow through. Their complaints are utterly meaningless because they utterly refuse to stick to their guns.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Yet, they use Brave.
That data isn’t nothing, either. Over ten years ago, Target was able to use shoppers habits to determine when women were pregnant, sometimes even before the women knew.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
Imagine how much more robust this has gotten 10 years later.
Moreover, resistance to this point, insisting you “don’t want to be told” to use something else, is how you betray yourself.
As long as you have this attachment to iPhone, where the very notion of switching to anything else triggers this feeling of annoyance and causes you to pull back reflexively, then you’ve already surrendered.
Consumer lock-in like this is exactly why Apple, Google and Microsoft get away with so much shit. Learn to walk away and try other things. And that goes for everyone, regardless of what hardware or OS you use.
My favorite way of putting it:
If you’re walking into a business or public venue or something, and there was someone at the door who, as the cost of entry, asked you your name, birthday, street address, phone number, likes, dislikes, names of all relatives and friends, and all of the places you’ve recently visited…most people would feel incredibly uncomfortable, turn around, and walk away.
Now imagine it’s not a person or a venue, it’s the Facebook sign up page. Why should you feel any less uncomfortable just because Mark Zuckerberg isn’t standing next to you asking you these things directly?
Well, also, bad things absolutely can happen right now, they just aren’t as obvious. People focus too much on how the government uses data to abuse people, not enough on how private companies can in opaque ways. Cambridge Analytica is an example of very bad things happening right now.
Also consider how the Supreme Court basically decided businesses discriminating against LGBT is acceptable. With how accessible user data is now, it would be trivial to put together a database of gay people, particularly same sex married couples, that businesses can check against. There’s also every reason to believe rulings like that will continue and new avenues of abuse will open up for private companies.
The same things that protects vulnerable people’s privacy also gives shelter to terrorism.
Yes. We know. We went through this already 20 years ago, except the boogyman was the Taliban and not the local fascists.
It changes nothing. Sacrificing individual privacy is not an adequate trade-off for the illusion of safety.
There. Is. Not. A. Single. Browser. That. Values. Your. Privacy.
Then get off the internet, I guess?
Mozilla is a non profit, which puts them leagues ahead of all competition in terms of trustworthiness. They have minor telemetry and sponsored things that can all be disabled, and that’s entirely because they need to make some money somehow. No one donates, so what do you expect them to do?
They respect your privacy by giving you the option to disable everything. That is far more respect than you will ever get from any of the chromium browsers.
Also, Mozilla is non-profit. They run on fumes because of it. As long as everything is disable-able, and it is, I’m happy to let them make some money so they can keep going. We need Firefox.
It’s infuriating that this video calls out Mozilla’s declaration that they respect user privacy, as if this contradicts that.
Respect is giving users options to do whatever they like and respecting their choices. Firefox does all of that. It respects you as the user and trusts you to control your own privacy by providing you the tools to do so.
Modern day software design emphasizes removing user choices so they’re easier to corral. Firefox will straight up let you break it if you want. It lets spinoffs like Fennec exist. That is user respect.
Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.
Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.
Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.
If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.
But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.
People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.
Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.