> RELEVANT suggestions
The fuck with this?
How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my (s/browsing history/activity/), profiling it and phoning back to the mothership?
(Edited, "browsing history" -> "activity")
The fuck with this?
How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my (s/browsing history/activity/), profiling it and phoning back to the mothership?
(Edited, "browsing history" -> "activity")
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you suggestions that match "hotels".
Doesn't seem that complicated to me.
Try again.
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you things related to "hotels".
That doesn't require access to your browsing history - it's right there in the search term.
The principal is the same. People don't want their private lives (in part expressed through what they search for) exploited and exposed.
I wish they'd give the about:config key to disable it as well as UI instructions in posts like this. The former can be set in a preferences file; so easily synchronised between machines and not forgotten when setting up a new one.
Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace".
You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?
Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's being passed on, etc. Just a bunch of hand waving and "don't you worry, everything is tip-top".
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
If adMarketplace is just receiving from Mozilla a stream of (search text, city, clicked yes/no) then no, I don't see a problem with it.
If Mozilla sends a unique user ID as well then I would see a problem with it, but as far as I can tell, they don't.
Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.
For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.
The default, in friendly big blue colors, is to "Allow suggestions" with the alternative called "Customize in settings". It is also not clear if disabling "suggestions", switches off all its machinery or merely prevents them from being shown.
As others have said up this thread, the problem is not as much the feature itself, but the fact that Mozilla deemed it perfectly fine to roll out something like this in the first place.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Mozilla no longer understands (or cares!) what it was that made Firefox special, made people stick with it and what the motivation and priorities of these people are.