We had a whole generation of people that were taught that 'no' means 'maybe later' (the whole point of the 'no means no' ads about daterapes), and that same generation is now running these companies. What did we expect to happen?

Which forks?

You can opt out of it?

Depending where you are it is. On some Mozilla communities you're downvoted into oblivion or dogpiled on for saying this. I was pleasantly surprised here that it wasn't

A lot of them are very fanboy heavy

Huh, that is a surprising new revelation.

Look here

I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.

just because its not as far-gone as Google

The fact that the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, despite wherever controversy there may be around their decisions of late, is a pretty significant factor.

If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.

Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.

Sadly this type of bloat sells as "features" to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I'm not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.

Lots of love for librewolf here.

Strong fingerprint resistance breaks a lot of sites so just get used to disabling that on whatever sites.

On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.

Isn't Mull basicslly Firefox since it's just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don't notice any other differences on my phone

"If the privacy invasion and corporate trend chasing doesn't hurt your soul"?

Did you miss the privacy invasion where Mozilla now sells private data to advertising companies directly?

But the thing is, most people don't think twice about it, and just go, "meh, why not, what's the harm?" and install it, which tells those scummy summersons that "we" want this, and they keep pushing it, and making their site more and more useless without it, to the point, where 'desktop view' no longer works (I'm looking at you, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, to name a few).

Mozilla says they use a third-party OHTTP intermediary. In the blog post linked above, they name Fastly as their partner. So it's not as bad as Mozilla + Mozilla-wearing-funny-glasses.

Personally, I still think this is the wrong approach to privacy, even though I've used Fakespot on my own many times over the years. Largely because I don't think any of this needs to be built into a web browser.

I would prefer my web browser to minimize information leakage by default, to the greatest degree that it can while still remaining useful as a web browser. Mozilla keeps adding bloat to Firefox, and bloat always comes at a cost. I'd much prefer these to be browser extensions that people can download if they want them, rather than built in by default. The baseline Firefox should be lean. Less "stuff" = smaller attack surface. Simplicity is best.

I mean, the Fakespot browser extension has existed for a long time, and I've never seriously considered installing it. I'd much rather just take an extra three seconds to load their web site and paste in a URL than have it constantly monitoring my activity and doing god-knows-what with it. That way I have better knowledge and control of what is happening with my data. Even if I trust their intentions, I don't implicitly trust their competence (all software has bugs) and I don't trust that they will never go rogue in the future.

And also, I just don't find this claim all that compelling in principle:

By processing the data jointly across two independent parties, they ensure neither party holds the information required to reveal sensitive information about someone.

I mean...sure. That's fair. Buuuuuut handing half the data to your "partner" doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence. Especially since literally nobody reads all of the privacy policies they are subject to. See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/04/19/150905465/to-read-all-those-web-privacy-policies-just-take-a-month-off-work

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/you-need-a-whole-workweek-every-month-to-read-privacy-policiesand-thats-bad-news

Minimizing privacy policies should be a high-priority goal for any organization that claims to value privacy.

Furthermore, how many additional parties have access (legally or otherwise) to both Mozilla and Fastly? 🤷

I don't trust Mozilla one single bit with my data as long as they have an advertising network enabled by default and use pingback telemetry for ALL actions you do in the browser by default that can only be turned off by changing multiple "hidden" about:config settings.

Wait, where does it say that Mozilla is the third-party intermediary server?

Nice. Thank you. For those who don't click the link, it appears you can disable by setting these flags:

browser.shopping.experience2023.active

and:

browser.shopping.experience2023.survey.enabled

To false.

EDIT: On finally getting back to my desktop and disabling these, it looks like there's a bunch of these browser.shopping.experience2023 flags. Some of them set to true, others false, I just set them all to false.

Floorp

Thanks, these look interesting. I've been using Firefox forever for my personal browsing (but Edge for work) and I'd prefer to stay with it if I can.

Since Firefox is free and open source, there are many other variations of it built and distributed by the community.

Different priorities for different people. The AI is what I really have an issue with right now. I'm sick of it being shoved down everyone's throats, and I have big ethical concerns about it in general.

Prob

Oh

Can you opt out?

Okay, but why do you think it's useless?

Must be an easy world where anyone disagreeing with you has to always be a shill. Gets you around annoying concepts such as arguments, discussions or opinions.

anonymized data can be re-identified

You're saying that no remotely normal person would ever bother to download Fakespot free of charge if it wasn't pushed at them through obnoxious in-browser advertising? And how much did Mozilla pay for this thing?

Normies.

Our IT department is constantly getting tickets to unblock random shitty stuff like that.

I cannot explain it, not even a little, I just know it's a thing.

Perhaps the general ad infestation of everything blurred the lines.

In a way, in the immediate sense of the moment, being sold bullshit by AI/algorithms or irl by a sales person isn't that much different. And people don't care about tomorrow or anything they can't immediately see.

(Im guessing, all of it)

Does fakespot have a chatbot? I thought it predated LLMs and is basically just some human-made algorithms to filter out suspicious reviews.

Why do advertisers want you to have tools that help you detect covert advertising?

Read the room

AI: "This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it."

There are literal bots on Reddit with less complexity able to measure the likelihood of a story being reliable and truthful, with facts and fact checkers. They're not always right, they ARE useful though. Or were. Not sure about now, been over a year since I left.

If by reliably you mean 99% certainty of one particular review, yeah I wouldn't believe it either. 95% confidence interval of what proportion of a given page's reviews are bots, now that's plausible. If a human can tell if a review was botted you can certainly train a model to do so as well.

What do you mean by "this stuff?" Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.