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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

At some point in the next five-ten years we will see this "feature" abused. Maybe Mozilla will use it to "soften" commonly used ad blockers to enable "acceptable" ads for Firefox users. Maybe Mozilla will be hacked by some government that wants to enable MITM attacks against its citizens, and Normandy will make that happen. Or maybe Mozilla will just cooperate with the government trying to do so.

You say it is "typically" used for benevolent purposes, but why should we trust Mozilla? Mozilla does not have a stellar history with this sort of thing and in my experience they do not take security as seriously as they should if we are to trust them with such a feature.

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The level of paranoia throughout this thread is truly through the roof.....

Mozilla has had several "PR nightmare" decisions that a vocal set of users didn't like, and sometimes were genuinely ill advised/bad/shitty. But as far as I can see they do not have a bad track record when it comes to security/privacy. Do you have any examples of actual serious security/privacy fuck ups by Mozilla/Firefox? I mean that stood up to scrutiny beyond the sensationalist headlines?

Their defaults might not be your defaults, but they are even working on bringing Tor into mainstream Firefox. None of this means they are above criticism of course, but... context!

The sum total of their actions points towards an organisation that has some internal problems but that is genuinely pursuing privacy and an open web as a goal for as many users as possible.

> Do you have any examples of actual serious security/privacy fuck ups by Mozilla/Firefox?

Sadly I don't, but others argue they have top notch standard security practices like automated alerts etc. regarding certificate renewals...

…This one?

This one isn’t very privacy-friendly or open. And that raises all the previous questions again. Should they maybe have learned something about clandestinely fucking with people’s systems?

> But as far as I can see they do not have a bad track record when it comes to security/privacy. Do you have any examples of actual serious security/privacy fuck ups by Mozilla/Firefox?

I mean, they are currently shipping real actual ads on the new tab page that aren't blocked by ad blockers - and possibly can't be (there are limits to what WebExtensions can modify on Firefox internal pages). Sure, maybe your parent comment was exaggerating a little bit, but what if Mozilla instead starts inserting "privacy-friendly" "recommendations" into webpages in order to "enhance users' browsing experiences"? That doesn't sound at all far-fetched for the Mozilla we know today.

Besides your claim not being true AFAIK tell [1](there are no ads on my new tab page, and as far as I can tell there was no incident of paid for content showing up on peoples new tab), how exactly would shipping ads be a privacy/security violation?

This is exactly the sensationalist misrepresentation I was talking about. You don't like what they are doing, fine. Misrepresenting it as something that it's not is not fine.

Besides: Mozilla is funded in large parts by having Google as the default search provider. This means they are funded by Google selling ads. Them starting up new revenue streams and getting away from that funding model would be a pro privacy step.

[1] If you are referring to something else that I missed, feel free to enlighten me.

Maybe you've opted out of studies or otherwise disabled Pocket? That's how they're bundling much of this new stuff in.

See: https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco... especially the part that says "From time to time, the occasional sponsored story may appear as a recommendation from Pocket. These stories will always be clearly marked, and you have control over whether they’re shown on your new tab page."

All so-called recommendations I've seen have been spammy, the sort of stuff you see linked as "other articles you may enjoy" when you disable your ad blocker on bad sites. Regardless, this directly contradicts your claim that there haven't been incidents of sponsored content on the new tab page: this is explicitly what is happening according to Pocket's own website. Mozilla themselves explicitly said they are introducing sponsored stories to the new tab page: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on...

I think there's a world of difference between making a search engine that sells ads the default, and selling ads yourself and inserting them into the browser's chrome. Among other issues, if I help someone install an ad blocker, that ad blocker will block ads on Google, but will not block ads in the browser chrome.

So, given this and other recent behavior by Mozilla, I have to say I don't think seeing "related stories" inserted into the browser chrome for certain web pages is at all far fetched. That should worry us.

I thought you were referring to the snippets.

I actually don't see the pocket recommendations on my desktop (maybe the Linux Mint build has them disabled by default), but they are there on mobile. There is a UI setting to disable them of course. It's explained right on the page that you link to.

More importantly, that page also explains that no data gets sent to Mozilla or pocket or anyone else for these ads to show up.

So again, no privacy violation here. I also think it's an extreme leap from "they show this in the new tab page which they design and control" to "they could start showing it overlayed on other peoples content".

I think they got some decisions very wrong. Among them not implementing a way to allow people to override signing of addons, which people did warn about. Having signatures enforced as a strong default is certainly good and right, but if they had included a "right click on addon, use without signature (WARNING THIS IS SKETCHY REAL ADDONS DON'T ASK YOU TO DO THIS)" option this signing issue would have been relatively mild.

But their track record on privacy/security simply isn't as bad as people make it out to be.

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