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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

My first thought seeing this headline: Let me guess, another move from Mozilla to start gathering more personal data. I wish they’d proven me wrong.

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Have you played with it at all? Mozilla isn't acting as a data broker, they're providing software and a framework. The world of iot doesn't have that many great offerings for private systems. Mozilla is taking their years of software experience and building something decent. I'm glad to see this hasn't been shuttered yet. I've been wanting to move more of my home automation away from cloud based services and this has a lot of potential. (The current best offering I know of is hass)

Even things Mozilla did pull support from and attempt to shutter, like Thunderbird and Firefox OS (now KaiOS) had vibrant communities that stepped up and kept these projects alive.

Mozilla does know how to build a community around the projects they work on.

Right, IIUC, the stated goal is to reach some standardization (https://www.w3.org/WoT/) for IoT communication. Which, in my opinion would be great for users if it panned out. It is not an ideal situation that people that prefer to control their IoT devices themselves need to rely on a myriad of integration plugins for hass. But I'm not hopeful that this will gain the required industry traction

How is Mozilla gathering personal data from people using WebThings? When I tried WebThings Gateway a few months back, it did not seem to collect/send personal data off site. It allows you to create a public endpoint as a subdomain of mozilla-iot.org for easy off site access (https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Gateway-Remote-Acce...) which would allow some tracking I assume, but in general I have noticed no hidden data collection as your comment implies.

>It allows you to create a public endpoint as a subdomain of mozilla-iot.org for easy off site access (https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Gateway-Remote-Acce...) which would allow some tracking I assume, but in general I have noticed no hidden data collection as your comment implies.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's not about keylogging your passwords or getting into your bank accounts. It's about the subtle metadata they'll be able to skim to start fingerprinting you for advertising profiles, and integrating into learning models. It just disgusts me that this has become the defacto behavior for every tech company now rather than "we want nothing to do with any of your analytics". Data is the new oil times 10, and this is Mozilla doing some exploration.

> for easy off site access Exactly. The WebThings Gateway on an RPi is behind a firewall. How to access it? Mozilla makes it easy for users to securely access their gateway when remote, by setting up a tunneling service for the .mozilla-iot.org subdomains that users configure during the setup process. Mozilla has to pay* for running the https tunneling services that allow this security. Mozilla wants to protect your security; they do not want your data. The subdomain enables Mozilla's setup process to download and install the cert for the subdomain you create (from LetsEncrypt) onto the gateway, so you don't have to figure it out on your own. If you have your own registered domain name and know how to install its cert and then expose and port forward 443 from your router to the WebThings gateway, Mozilla would be happy because that reduces their tunneling expense. The goal was to make it easy for users to run a secure gateway by default. But with an OpenWrt router approach, appropriate firewall rules and dynamic dns can help reduce the need for the tunneling service, yet keep things secure. Maybe eventually ordering your own complete domain could be part of the setup process, but you'd be paying some 3rd party to make that happen, whereas the subdomain approach keeps it free.

> Have you ever wanted to know how many times the door was opened and closed while you were out? Are you curious about energy consumption of appliances plugged into your smart plugs? With the new logs features you can _privately_ log data from all your smart home devices and visualise that data using interactive graphs.

> Note: If booting WebThings Gateway from an SD card on a Raspberry Pi, please be aware that logging large amounts of data to the SD card may make the card wear out more quickly!

I thought Mozilla was pro-privacy with all the features they have added to the browser. Have I been missing something? I recently came back to Firefox for their stance on privacy.

No, you're right on Mozilla's stance on privacy. I think Mozilla keeps making things that are good for collecting customer data because those are the things that most need an open alternative.

the WebThings gateway is an opportunity for Mozilla to help protect privacy and security, not copy the approach of industry silo's where devices connect to the cloud. your gateway data stays local.

yes, This is what I call privacy by design:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design

ps: I am a contributor of it ;)

"another move from Mozilla to start gathering"

What do you mean by "another move" here? Mozilla isn't gathering anything!

Not exactly correct. There was a lot of movement in Mozilla to become a services provider rather than just a software vendor. Firefox Account is the manifestation of that.

I can't tell what exactly their management is thinking, but from my sofa it looks like that just as everyone else, Mozilla wants you to be a part of their proprietary[1] ecosystem.

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[1] Proprietary as in "unique to the company, not compatible with anything else and in full control of that company", not as in "closed source" or "non-free/non-libre software".

I work for Mozilla. But I have absolutely no clue what you're going on about here. Our whole reason for existence is to support a standards-based web and avoid proprietary lock-in. Yes, you can use Mozilla services. But you don't have to. I imagine that if there were a privacy-preserving service that got popular, and allowed storing and syncing the sorts of profile data that FxAccounts is used for, then Mozilla might be interested in making an adapter (or defining an API layer.) But these things tend to be tightly integrated, so I'm not sure if it would be worth the trouble. (I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool to share open tabs across different browsers...)

What about keybase?

Mozilla put in a lot of effort to let you run your own Firefox Accounts server if you really want to. https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...

So pretty much the opposite of what you're afraid of.

Looks like this has improved a lot since I used it a few years ago. That documentation even seems a bit outdated -- the new monorepo is here: https://github.com/mozilla/fxa.

I eventually abandoned it when I was cutting back on things I had to manage, but maybe I'll take another look soon...

First of all, that's not what proprietary means. Second of all, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Mozilla is a registered non-profit. This means they are legally required to uphold their mission statement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ . Mozilla Corp. (the for profit arm of Mozilla) simply exists as a funnel for money into The non-profit.

It is not in Mozilla's best interest to create any sort of walled garden. In fact, Mozilla has a long history of fighting against the concept of walled gardens on every front.

It's reasonable to be worried about Mozilla turning to the dark side, but claiming that they already have is simply false. What we need to do as people concerned with the well being of the internet and the people that use it is support Mozilla financially and politically to keep them on the right path.

Just as an example, if people were more willing to donate to Mozilla, do you think it would be necessary for them to take on search partnerships?

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