• 1 Post
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoFirefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future."English
    1·
    8 days ago

    Reviving a long-dead thread for a relevant update, in a top-level post because you deleted all of your replies in the thread where it was relevant.

    Mozilla did reply to my email asking for clarification on their Fakespot privacy policy, and whether they collect or sell user data, as we were discussing - though that reply took them four weeks. Their response in full:

    “”" Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

    We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

    Kind regards, Mozilla “”"

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoFirefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future."English
    102·
    8 days ago

    From the same privacy policy you linked:

    I don’t personally understand the disconnect between the parts we each posted, but there is a clear disconnect regardless.

    And, regardless, this applies to fakespot.com. Not Firefox. Not even slightly Firefox. Firefox unambiguously has nothing to do with selling user data.

    Edit: I’ve also gone ahead and sent an email to the address at the bottom of the policy asking for clarification on the issue.

    Four weeks later edit: They replied to my email. Here is their response:

    Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards,
Mozilla
  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoFirefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future."English
    401·
    1 month ago

    I think it’s probably a combination of both. There’s an astroturfing campaign going on somewhere, just not on Lemmy, which is overall too small and insignificant to target. But astroturfing works - it creates the echo chambers you’re talking about, it creates apathy. Most people just read headlines, not even the comments. You read a bad story about Mozilla once a week and you’ll start to internalize it - eventually your opinion of Mozilla will drop, justified or not, to the point where you’re willing to believe even the more heinous theories about it.

    So you end up with a lot of people who’ve been fed a lot of misleading half-truths and even some outright lies, who are now getting angry enough about the situation they think is going on to start actively posting anti-Mozilla posts and comments on their own.

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoFirefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future."English
    154·
    1 month ago

    Your own 2023 article doesn’t say anything about policies allowing Mozilla to sell private data, and Mozilla’s own website openly and proudly claims they neither buy nor sell their users’ data.

    And Anonym is a company purpose-created to try to transform the advertising industry into a more privacy-respecting industry. Its mission could not align more with Mozilla’s. They in particular developed PPA, the feature Firefox was getting so much bad press about last week - and which ended up being none of the things the dozens of articles posted about it claimed. It is, in fact, a complete non-factor when it comes to privacy risks, and its explicit purpose is to pivot the internet toward a significantly more private ecosystem.

    There are lots of people claiming Mozilla is becoming an advertising company and is selling their users out. There’s some misleading evidence that even makes that superficially appear true. But it’s false.

    The fact that Mozilla hasn’t talked much about ad blockers since then is, I think, significant.

    When have they talked about ad blockers in the past, period? This is just a meaningless scare tactic. I don’t see them talking about arctic drilling either - should I be concerned?

    From the same page you got your image from:

  • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldtoFirefox@lemmy.ml•Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future."English
    44·
    1 month ago

    My own reading of the situation on the developer’s GitHub is unfortunately that the review by Mozilla is indeed completely inaccurate in every way. No way to even read it as a “Each side has their own story” type of thing since they reproduce Mozilla’s emails verbatim. They seem just materially incorrect. The source files referenced by the emails are visible on the same GitHub account, along with their complete histories showing no changes at all - the issues referenced don’t and never did exist.

    The only redeeming thing I can find is that the dev (ambiguously) seems to have never replied to the email from Mozilla about the issues, and so Mozilla was never made aware that there was an issue with the review that needed fixing. They seem to have done this because they perceived the process as hostile and not worth engaging with, which… fair, I guess.