"If we can use your details to legally make a profit, we probably will." | Hacker News Reader

"If we can use your details to legally make a profit, we probably will."

addons.mozilla.org

33 pointsldayley17 comments

Just to make this clear: this was not said by Mozilla, despite it being on the Mozilla domain. It was written by "Screenshot Pimp", who wrote their own Privacy Policy. If you read it, the whole policy attempts a humorous tone.

The add-on is clearly marked on the download page as having been only preliminarily reviewed, which means that it is yet to get a thorough review (and can be treated as "experimental"). Here's what it looks like: http://cl.ly/1a2b2T2v2V2L3M0f3G3W

We're looking into it now, but as far as we can tell there is nothing malicious about their actual add-on.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Mozilla employee who works on the site linked to, addons.mozilla.org)

Take note that this is a privacy policy for a preliminarily reviewed add-on (only reviewed for basic security issues) and most likely written in jest.

Definitely funny as hell though! I like the part about looking at me through my webcam. I am more prone to try this product now than I would be after reading a normal privacy policy. This may be a jab at mozilla also as they REQUIRE a privacy policy for every addon.

Privacy policies are entirely optional for add-ons unless they do something with user data.

According to one of the comments the add-in rewrites amazon searches to provide affiliate income to the authors of the extension. So, it may not be in jest. I certainly wouldn't use this extension.

I don't see any problem with affiliate links.

We do we think that we are totally entitled to someone's work, be it a plugin or anything, but have problems giving back even in the totally easy, transparent and of no cost to us method of affiliate links?

I'm not talking about this add-on or comment in particular, I'm talking a animosity I see towards affiliate links in general.

Affiliate links seem OK if your website is actually driving traffic to e.g. Amazon.com, but simply rewriting every link to Amazon.com on any page (even ones that already were someone else's legit affiliate links) seems a bit abusive.

Do you really want to be a victim of an arms race where every extension tries to outdo all other extensions when it comes to rewriting affiliate links, etc?

The headline is a fairly misleading: I thought it was a quote from somebody at Mozilla saying something stupid.

How do you flag an extension for manual review? This is just making all add-ons look bad.

We're already on it, however there's a "Report Abuse" link here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/screenshot-pi...

A parody to show that nobody reads privacy agreements?

Maybe, but the user reviews indicate that the app install lots of bloat and borders on malware.

At least they're honest!

Headline is very misleading--link and karma bait. Should be flagged and removed.

The fact that the domain is "mozilla.org" means nothing. Should we remove every google.com post because it doesn't come from a Google employee but a Google+ page? Nothing is misleading here.

A more honest headline would have been:

Firefox 3rd Party Plugin TOS: "If we can use your details to legally make a profit, we probably will."

The current headline, even if not deliberately misleading, is poor because it lacks proper context and isn't descriptive. Instead, it lets the user make assumptions about who said it and click the link to validate their assumption. It is most definitely misleading because the headline + domain is a half-truth.

It is /most likely/ link-bait, or at best an inexperienced user who should be taught that these sorts of headlines are not constructive to the community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com