Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising

zdnet.com

23 pointstanglesome10 comments

It was not done quietly at all. The browser also makes a huge deal about what these new tiles are and what information is exchanged. Which is something along the lines of "what percentage of all tiles clicked where ads"

The browser downloads all ads and decides LOCALLY which ads or suggestions to display - that is, it is done privately.

This advertisement is way more private and transparent than Mozillas normal third party ads programme, through google/yahoo search.

Yea came to say this, it wasn't quiet at all, its been pretty heavily debated in the community for over a year and Mozilla was very careful to maintain privacy concerns when implementing it.

"The Community" is not the only ones using FireFox. Does anyone really believe that any corporation is really being "very careful to maintain privacy concerns" anymore?

Mozilla is not a company. I actually have a lot of trust in them (unlike actual tech companies).

That trust is built on their past actions - particularly in comparison to those of their profit-driven private peers.

Is this the same as "Suggested Sites"? If so, you just click the gear in the top right on the new tab page and uncheck "Include suggested sites". Pretty simple to disable, at least on the latest beta and dev editions.

Another tempest in a teapot like when they integrated Pocket (right click > remove from toolbar takes 2 seconds)?

> Another tempest in a teapot like when they integrated Pocket (right click > remove from toolbar takes 2 seconds)

Except all these things that take time to learn about and remove are starting to add up and ultimately end up taking far more than 2 seconds each.

Pocket should never have been bundled in the first place and should have continued to exist as an easily installable/uninstallable addon/extension. The Mozilla governance forum has over 20 pages of people complaining about Pocket bundle-ware and Mozilla continues to twiddle its thumb claiming "just 2 clicks to remove/we asked a few people and they don't mind it":

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2...

"That said, Firefox does send your browser history to Mozilla."

Does anyone know what url they use for this so I can host file it?

Did you misquote the article?

"That said, Firefox does send your browser Mozilla interaction history with the Tiles feature"

It sounds like Mozilla is only capturing how you interact with the tiles, not what websites you visit.

That sounds dangerously like it's "telemetry," and that's a dirty word around these parts now.

I copied and pasted directly from the article. Stealth edit I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com

​Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising

Mozilla quietly deploys built-in Firebox advertising