> Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit
Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers.
The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users.
As far as I know Mozilla hasn't disclosed how much money they spent buying up Anonym, but they'll want a return on their investment. I don't think they're going to abandon it as quickly as they did their ideals.
They opted firefox users into a data collection scheme they call PPA which works kind of like FLOC and uses the browser to gather information about what you do online, then they sell that data to advertisers by first sending it to yet another a third party who will assemble that data into reports for the advertisers. Then they basically said firefox users were too stupid to be trusted to opt-in, and it would be too hard to explain to such dumb users how selling their data was a good thing, so Mozilla had no choice but to force it on everyone by default without telling them about it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20240715112635/https://mastodon....)
I don't understand what you're talking about. Do you have a reference? All I can find are UI experiments, AFAICT "what impact to telemetry does this UI change make?"
I see some have addons.. but actually my point is precisely that I don't understand it - these addons can be auto installed? They can make requests? They're not on searchfox?
Just a few days ago, they updated their android application info and stated they're going to share location data with third parties for "Advertising or Marketing" purposes...[1]
They also removed a promise to "never sell your data" in their FAQ[2] 2 weeks ago.
Sure, but my point is that Firefox has been funded by Google since 2006, and by having it as the default search engine, Firefox has been sending suggestion queries and searches to Google.
Of course, the nuance here is that this was part of a user action, i.e., the user probably wants to search, so they expect data to be sent to Google (although the address bar suggestions are a gray area IMO). However, what hasn't been expected, and the whole purpose of the GDPR, is that Google does store your search history for advertising purposes without user consent.
So, even if it was unavoidable, Firefox has already been selling user data to Google by simply making it the default search engine and getting paid to do it.
BTW, the GDPR is really strict, and I'll know that Firefox actually sells my data (in a way that I don't expect) when I'll see a GDPR interstitial about it for getting my consent. For instance, when you first open Microsoft's Edge in the EU, they inform users that they're going to share their data with the entire advertising industry.
As I understand, these "data safety" sections are what Google gives app owners to comply with "right to be informed". If they say "we're sharing location data with third parties for Advertising purposes" I'm believing it.
I agree that they should really be asking for consent as well, but they don't seem to be doing that. We've got no way to use legitimate location related functionality and deny advertising related usecases. Remember, consent must be specific and granular.
It'll be a while, until enforcement catches up. It's taken ~6 years for cookie banners to get a "reject" button and those are really easy to review and enforce.
It'll happen though, enforcement is just slow. GDPR is a fairly well written regulation, as far as corner cases and catching workarounds goes. So unless the laws change, enforcement will catch up eventually.
Regarding the Anonym acquisition, every adtech acquisition is a reverse-acquisition. Google didn't really go evil until they got reverse-acquired by DoubleClick.
Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers.
The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users.
As far as I know Mozilla hasn't disclosed how much money they spent buying up Anonym, but they'll want a return on their investment. I don't think they're going to abandon it as quickly as they did their ideals.