I'm really trying to make sense of the new @mozillaofficial privacy policy.
Here's where I'm getting tripped up:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about ‘selling data’)
OK, sure. But if Moz isn't "selling my data in the way that most people think about selling data" then how *is* Moz selling my data?
"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)."
Unfortunately, they're going about this in the same weasel way as Meta, Google, et al.
🤥 Claims of end-user #privacy via data aggregation are disingenuous -- as we've seen repeatedly.
Author of these new terms is recent hire Ajit Varma.
"Varma, the author of the above announcements, as a Firefox veep after previously looking after WhatsApp for Meta, and before that, Gmail, and its related tools for Google."
⭐ Don't hire from bad actors lest you become one.
📚 Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models [Nature][open access]
2019 article about the realities of privacy of aggregated user data:
"... 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes."
Anonymization has been the main means of addressing privacy concerns in sharing medical and socio-demographic data. Here, the authors estimate the likelihood that a specific person can be re-identified in heavily incomplete datasets, casting doubt on the adequacy of current anonymization practices.
Cory Doctorow
Drew Crecente (they/them)