nixCraft 🐧Waterfox: No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/
LibreWolf is another option. It is a custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom with all bad bits (like LLM/AI, No trackers/telemetry, enhanced privacy etc) removed.
* Repo https://codeberg.org/librewolf
* Home page https://librewolf.net
Sebastian Z@nixCraft Is "No trackers/telemetry, enhanced privcy" part of the bad bits of firefox? if yes, how are they doing it wrong?
Victoria🏳️⚧️@tragivictoria I think we are all misunderstanding each other.
Anyway, which telemetry can be good? I think each data transmission from the consumer to the supplier should be voluntary and actively done. For instance, when sending a crash report.
@sebzuen anything that's not sensitive/private info is fine. There's no reason collecting hardware information is bad.
And opt-in telemetry is worse than not having it at all.
@tragivictoria Realistically speaking, I agree that everything non-sensitive/private is fine for devs to collect.
Generally, it's a matter of policy in my eyes. When it is only for the supplier to decide which kind of telemetry they collect, consumers have to trust their goodwill or live with the consequences of them gathering bad telemetry. There is no way for consumers to actively take part in the decision process what is gathered.
@sebzuen Thats why transparent telemetry is important (in the topic of Mozilla, not sure they qualify here? Not sure). But realistically any and all telemetry discourse is poisoned by "NOOOO DON'T SPY ON ME PLEASE DONT COLLECT MY PRIVATE INFORMATION I WILL SWITCH TO SOMETHING ELSE PLESSE DONT", so any public discussions on the topic dont do any good :(
That being said, i would love privacy laws to restrict the bad telemetry. Not sure how this one would be feasible tho.
@tragivictoria ah I understand! one of the discussions where a general public is lacking the required specific knowledge to make a based decision...
@tragivictoria
And even if it's just hardware info, that brings us back to the classic problem of iPhone users being shown higher prices than Android users....
And even if it's just hardware info, that brings us back to the classic problem of iPhone users being shown higher prices than Android users....
@sebzuen mind sharing more?
Recent investigative work:
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/
Explanations of dynamic pricing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435923000544
blog article about the very iPhone topic (reeks of AI writing, no sources):
https://spyboy.blog/2024/11/24/unfair-pricing-tactics-targeting-iphone-users/
@tragivictoria But to be fair, I am not knowledgeable enough about the intricacies of telemetry development.
I appreciate your opinions; I just argue from a perspective of privacy and democracy.
I appreciate your opinions; I just argue from a perspective of privacy and democracy.
@sebzuen haha i am also very much pro-privacy :) its just that it's very hard to develop popular software without telemetry, otherwise its really just game of guessing (i am speaking here from context of browsers, like Firefox or desktops, like GNOME)
@tragivictoria
Do you think an active community around a dev project that provides constant testing and feedback might be enough to substitute telemetry?
Do you think an active community around a dev project that provides constant testing and feedback might be enough to substitute telemetry?
@sebzuen its of course very important too! But there are things where this isn't enough. Like for example telemetry would be super useful for GNOME to know how many users use wayland or xorg sessions. Instead basically no one had any solid data on the matter. Hard to give more examples, because it really depends what data would be gathered.