Suggested sites in Firefox based on browsing history

Ah fuck. https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/files/2015/05/How-...

In that diagram, I imagine my history, IP, etc getting compromised at every arrow location. Dammit. Mozilla had been doing so well when it came to freedom.

"Providing a Valuable Platform for Advertisers, Content Publishers, and Users" Sure does say a lot about their priorities here, doesn't it? First come advertisers, then publishers, then in last place are the users. This is the message I'm getting.

This is serious. My browsing history is private. I neither want Google nor Mozilla to sell it to companies which in turn use it to control markets and make me pay more for products. I can't prevent all the stuff Google is doing, but I can prevent Mozilla from accessing my private data.

Well, goodby Firefox, it's been a pleasure for the last 10+ years.

This feature does not sound promising to privacy minded users. I understand that Mozilla needs money to operate but this will drive away a lot of people. Most average users won't mind this kind of behavior though. A simple pop-up once you update/install Firefox saying something like "Would you like to turn on interest based tiles?" should do the trick. Either that or a separate build of Firefox (dev edition?).

I'm a strong opponent when it comes to sharing more then needed. Sharing my browser history and behavior with a 3rd/2nd party is sharing way more then necessary.

Between this an putting DRM into firefox, Mozilla seems to be channeling Neville Chamberlain:

    "My good friends, for the second time this week, a *Mozilla team member*
     has returned from *Content Services* bringing *privacy* with *"tailored ads"*.

     I believe it is *privacy* for our time...

     Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."

Appeasement just cost them them a lot of support. Unfortunately, this was probably inevitable, given that Mozilla was firmly in the "Open Source" camp. A lot of people like to complain about the strict ideological rigidity of RMS and the FSF. As we see here, without the foundation that is focused on the Free (as in speech) ideals and putting the user first, the 'pragmatic" decisions of Open Source allow it to be captured by popular faction.

The problem with this situation isn't ads. It isn't even the obvious privacy issues that end up being lampshaded with promises of anymization and servers that never get hacked or changed in future updates. The really damning thing about putting ads into Firefox is the conflicting incentives it introduces. Previously, Mozilla just had a cache problem. Now they have a slightly smaller cache problem and are financially dependent on advertisers.

When (not if) those advertisers request something more intrusive, is Mozilla prepared to give up that income source to protect their users? No, that's the problem with paying the Dane-geld[1] - you never get rid of the Dane.

[1] http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html

Mozilla needs money to function; this is true. But I am deeply disappointed that have resorted to this. I do not consider Chrome, Opera, Konqerour, or Safari to be real options for my use case, but I don't want to use a Firefox which spies on me. I don't know what I'm going to do about that.

Edit: reading further, there is clear effort to protect user's privacy. But I'm still uneasy.