@pluralistic @mozillaofficial
Doesn't Google pay them to have their search bar defaulted? I wonder if it's related.
Plus all of the things they're saying about anonymized advertising tokens or whatever

Edit; I'm not interested to learn about the nuances of their pivot to advertising friendliness

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

Did the people responsible for Biden’s messaging jump over to Moz? 🤦🏻

(disclaimer, I worked at nscp and i want moz to succeed, despite themselves)

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

"Anonymizing" is nonsense in this context; they're providing user data to 3rd parties in exchange for something. This is a "sale" as reasonable people would understand it.

"We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)."

@pluralistic Mozilla leaves your data in a hollow tree in a nearby park, and then two weeks later it finds a fat brown envelope stuffed with dollar bills under the doormat. The two events could be quite unrelated, so it's hard to show that Mozilla’s really SELLING the data, per se.

Your data wants to be free. Mozilla accepts modest contributions to cover the costs of giving your data its liberty.

Mozilla is paid exclusively in eggs and maple syrup. It's more like barter than an actual sale.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial "we promise we're not gonna do what you think we're gonna do, but we're not gonna tell you what we're going to actually do" shady af, poor communication at best

ima start packing

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Can I raise a thought, not as an accusation, but as a question of 'is this a valid concern?'

We always assume data is for advertisers selling AI penis pills, but politics is big money. Possibly bigger.

If political parties or the like wanted to pay good money to profile the people who are trying not to be profiled, wouldn't buying Mozilla data be invaluable?

Especially since Big Tech is rapidly aligning with the new regime, it's hard to shake the thought.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

They explained it in a blogpost that almost nobody read because it came too late and apparently isn’t linked in the right places:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Well yes, if it's worth something to the data market, then it's worth protection for the user.

The value of that data, whether anonymized or identifiable, translates into consumers paying (more).

It's leveraging gateway privilege, part of the 'walled garden' strategy.

Based on all their communications in the past few years I perceive that they are trying to set themselves up to be an advertising platform.

Your search queries and anything else you type in the url bar, for example, will be analyzed and the results shared with advertisers — without telling them more than what they need to know to best enhance your web experience with ads, so your privacy remains protected. This system will make Firefox commercially viable by rapidly shrinking its userbase down to a more sustainable size.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial The whole thing is the wrong question. IDGAF if they're selling it or not. The problem is that they're claiming a right to even have it. Mozilla is not party to anything we do with Firefox, but they're trying to insert themselves there, and they can fuck right off about that.

You can't sell something you don't have. The problem isn't the selling but the having.

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial

Here’s a question — Mozilla is motivated by money to be “viable” — if every user paid $1/month, they’d be overflowing with cash. How many people need to spend $10/month to adequately fund Firefox to be a private and secure browser?

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial smells like selling training data to LLM companies or training LLMs themselves to sell as a service.

Also i absolutely resent the "oh, we are so sorry you were confused by our statement"

I HATE that patronizing double speak corporate PR bullshit.

#firefoxgate

@pluralistic @mozillaofficial Apparently it has to do with CCPA’s definition of “selling data” which simply includes data being transferred to any third party for any reason. Because Mozilla uses tools for collecting usage metrics and has some marketing and tracking stuff built in, any third party involved in this would receive this data, and the CCPA considers this “selling data”.

It can apparently be so over-broad that service providers have included this kind of language simply for your data being hosted in their services in a third party provider like Hetzner, AWS, etc.

So it appears to be some potentially over-broad definitions in law.