Firefox Personal Data Promise

Be careful taking in this new direction as anything more than marketing PR. As you've stated before, I don't even think this time, it's anything more than the marketing department speaking for everyone. Mozilla has had weak statements on previous PR controversy's before. On a longer timescale, the organization will change it's position again due to economic and cultural pressures.

It's interesting to me how you can call out this post and recent others as a "marketing initiative from Mozilla" without any apparent backlash (as of yet), but when I called it "brigading by Mozilla supporters and fans" on multiple other threads I was completely removed from the conversation. Is there really a difference?

Is this the sort of story that casual users or even avid fans of the browser would organically promote? That's the logic that I was handed in some of the responses to me. Am I that out of place to assume that the following is how it goes down? 1.) The marketing/evangelical folks at Mozilla create a story and post it here and elsewhere. 2.) They put out a call to all their supporters in various channels to come and help promote the story (and keep other commenters in line apparently)...

I think the problem is that comment forums always optimize towards showing me what the currently active mob/majority thinks about a topic rather than sorting things towards my own personal tastes. I'd much rather see a rating system that weights posts/topics and comments based on my history. For instance: if I've promoted a certain topic in the past, put it higher. If I typically promote a given user, put their comment higher. If I typically promote a certain user who promoted another comment, put that comment higher. And so on. Basically censor the stuff I usually disagree with instead of allowing mob rule. [1]

I don't see the point of trying to make everybody see the same truth because that's not how real life works. Mostly, people tend to live in tribes. Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet wasn't always in your face telling you how wrong you are? IMO, such systems would put a chill on the global culture war.

[1] - This might be the perfect problem for a graph database. If anyone wants to work on something like this, let me know how to contact you and I'll give you all of my ideas!

I mean... I’m fine with Cloudflare DoH being an option.

But being the default? That’s just crazy.

Do you think there are users for whom this might be a valuable feature that protects them from snooping ISPs?

Any such feature, of course, must be something configurable such that any user wishing to use their own DNS provider can do so.

Mozilla has published a DoH resolver policy[0], which should hopefully allow more resolvers to be added to the default list, and let Firefox pick as per latency.

My personal resolver gives me better latency than both CF and Google, and I plan to get it added to the list[1].

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/DOH-resolver-policy

[1]: https://captnemo.in/dns/privacy/, https://captnemo.in/doh/

DOH makes Pihole ineffective.

What makes you think your local DNS resolver is more secure? Does it have a secure connection to all of its upstream sources?

Um, wtf? So, they're now bypassing user choice on DNS in order to send your domain lookups to Cloudflare and this is supposed to be security?

From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1529437 it says "[QA:] We have finished testing ... GREEN - SHIP IT" and "signed version [...] for release". Does that mean it went mainstream and is now a browser default?

I see a preference name "network.trr.uri" with a cloudflare URL used for "dns-query" ... that looks bad?

Edit: just found this from Mozilla

"We are currently exploring what the right testing approach should be with users who have opted to participate by using Firefox Nightly." (from Senior Dir. for Eng., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/20/mozilla_firefox_tes...)

Mozilla's official line is that they consider using nightly as an opt in to send all your DNS requests to a third-party.

Now come on, no-one at Mozilla believes that is true to users expectations.

It is the same claimed position maybe, but Google consider targeted ads a service to users

Tbh, I don't have as big an issue with Mozilla "taking" lots and lots of my PII as I do with Mozilla sending data about me to 3rd-parties.

That is unfortunately not alluded to directly at all in this promise.

In fact, for an org championing privacy, one would expect them to at the very least be compliant with something like the GDPR. However, the privacy link[0] in the footer of their website lists data to 3rd-parties by default and describes (pretty non-straighforward) methods to opt-out of each of these individually, rather than the normally required explicit consent of GDPR.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/websites/#cookies

Most of the data that is collected by Mozilla is not PII.

See our data collection guidelines: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection

Funnily enough, the Pocket logo is present in the thumbnail for the Firefox Family video on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ Pocket does not however feature in the video (which is unironically hosted on that Google video hosting platform...)

Pocket isn't really Firefox-branded. Neither are Seamonkey, Thunderbird, Bugzilla, Rust, etc which didn't make the list.

It was a perfect time to strike while Google is being seen to make anti-user decisions with Chrome and ad-blocking add-ons. I don’t know if it was a coincidence but the timing was excellent.

Of all the things I wish Mozilla did differently, their choice of internal corporate email provider is roughly at the bottom of the list. Using a FOSS solution provides essentially zero benefit to even a fraction of a percent of their users.

I don't know. I hate DRMs and so far I've successfully managed to avoid using EME.

But I recently said good things about Firefox to someone, and noticed one day that they switched to it from Edge. It felt like a small victory.

This person uses Netflix and Spotify. If Firefox didn't support EME, they would not have ditched Spotify and Netflix. They would probably have gone back to Edge, or installed Chrome and used EME from there. EME would not exist in my ideal world but in this case I'm kind of happy EME works in Firefox. Using Firefox over Edge or Chrome is a net gain. Maybe this person will evolve and start to refuse DRMs and/or seek free software (one can dream), but this is not today. Firefox acts like an entry point to this world. If the entry point is too rough, it will not be taken. One thing at a time.

EME is a lost battle, but the war is not over.