I wouldn’t be surprised at it being a combination of both. It’s easy to be paranoid about this stuff because corporations have shown again and again that trusting them is a mistake, but Google and MS (plus many others like advertisers) do have a financial incentive to reduce trust in Mozilla so people go back to using their options and seeing those ads.
I’d love a subscription-based privacy review service. Hell, combine it with a full product review where the consumers of the reviews are paying for it, rather than ad revenue, commissions from selling what they are reviewing, free products from the makers, or being outright fronts for marketers.
Like that report about all car companies selling cars that are spy machines was very good to know, as much as it sucked to see confirmation that that was indeed the case.
If there’s enough easy visibility on who is doing privacy right and wrong, then there might actually be more economic incentive to make good products instead of trying to sell out their own customers to make an extra buck.