Mozilla's positioning as a privacy advocate while consistently pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating.
I'm not sure we can meaningfully advocate for privacy atm without having a better understanding of what data big tech collects, what inferences they can glean from even limited data sets, what changes in behavior their customers can nudge users toward, and the worst-case hazards that extant algos can create.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind joining an "Evilcorp" social media network run by FSF, EFF, or some such, if it were done in a way where the insights gleaned about big tech dangers were to be made public in a responsible way. It's one thing to watch a documentary that provides a vignette with actors showing how social media might nudge a teen away socializing to instead check their status updates. It's quite another to find out that a single, seemingly trivial change to the "Evilcorp" feed caused an average of 2 hours less sleep for its userbase.
I'd also want to know-- what's the worst case sleep loss average? It's important to have detailed answers to these kinds of questions if we want to meaningfully protect our privacy online. And we don't even have something as crucial as `git blame` for these types of things.
And given the ubiquity of data mining today, the dangers of creating such a dataset must be a drop in the bucket by comparison.
this is a research tool. People voluntarily and with their own consent contribute data to understand how tech companies and algorithms use data.
If privacy now apparently entails that voluntarily collected data for scientific purposes is illegitimate we better close every university and business on earth down. These complaints are getting a little bit ridiculous.