Mozilla purchased FakeSpot back in May 2023, and at the time, I sounded the alarm because of the dubious privacy policy they imported without changing.

People told me to Wait and See. And I waited, and Mozilla never changed it.

Unfortunately, if you Wait and See for too long, things apparently become Too Old Too Matter.

Mozilla genuinely believes that this company follows the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. At least, according to what Mozilla.vc says on its homepage.

(See more of the $35 million of its investments there.)

Other investments include:

• Rodeo, an app that acknowledges the Gig Economy is harmful to Uber and Lyft drivers, but fundamentally doesn’t want to change those harms.
• HuggingFace, a company valued at $4.5 billion already.
• lockrMail, an “inbox protecting” tool with a Chrome extension but no Firefox equivalent, and a direct competitor to Firefox Relay.

So do you actually draw the line at Mozilla never building stuff like this into their browser, or is that a line you would be willing to cross too?

I won’t trust the AI Mozilla uses until they show us the source data. Not the source code that consumes a massive binary blob; the stuff that generated the binary blob they are using.

Address owner: Google LLC?

https://dnschecker.org/domain-ip-lookup.php?query=prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net%2F&dns=cloudflare

The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.

The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone’s local computer.

I would advise withholding any donation to Mozilla until they allow you to fund Firefox development, rather than going in a pool that will probably end up in some random venture capital investment into an AI firm.

Or a cryptocurrency one.

Yeah, Mozilla invested in fucking cryptocurrency.

https://world.webacy.com/welcome-to-webacy-3-0-built-for-defi-users-and-all-digital-asset-holders-to-protect-their-wallets/

If Mozilla is engaging in unethical behavior that publicly violates its own alleged principles, people can point it out.

But sure, here are a few suggestions:

1. Continue finding white label services they can sell, such as Mozilla VPN
2. Create a donation system using GNU Taler that you can put towards websites you visit, like brave Rewards already has.
3. Allow users to give donations explicitly to Firefox development instead of Mozilla itself.
4. End the $65 million in donations towards AI.
5. Follow typical market forces and lower the CEO pay instead of raising it by nearly $2 million.

The fact that Mozilla is not as evil as Google (yet) is only so good, though. If they continue in this downward trajectory, they might eventually put out a browser worse than Chrome, and if that becomes the case… I guess so.

If Mozilla is hemorrhaging money, then maybe they should plug the $65 million in donations towards AI and venture capital firms. Maybe they should lower the CEO salary, which is what happens in general to CEO salaries when markets underperform… Instead of raising it by nearly $2 million.

Thanks for the link to the privacy policy. You notice, at the bottom, it has links to both “About Mozilla” and “About FakeSpot”?

When you run the Orbit extension, it connects to two domains with every request:

1. orbitbymozilla.com
2. prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net

There’s FakeSpot again.

And FakeSpot has a terrible privacy policy that allows sale of private data directly to advertisers.

It’s unclear to me what the mobile Firefox homepage even is. It doesn’t increase the tab count, it just sort of hovers over your screen. And you can get to it by either pressing the Home button or the New Tab button; both of these do almost the same thing.

What are you talking about? This is the Firefox community, not many people are going to stop mid-post to say “BTW I hate Google more”

… BTW, I hate Google more.

And you’re incorrect: the community for leaving Google is more than four times the size of the community about Google.

As of August 2024, diaspora* is the only actively developed project classified under the tradition fediverse term that doesn’t support ActivityPub.

• Wikipedia

The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.

- Mozilla Manifesto, Principle 6, emphasis mine

The one Mozilla executive who agrees with you (that employees should be put ahead of profit) is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Mozilla over that.

Like all products, Firefox still maintains a small core of uncritical, devoted fans. To them, Mozilla can do no wrong.

The problem is, up until a few months ago, Mozilla advocated for privacy and other public facing values that lined up with their manifesto. Now, they are breaking away from that, and the true believers are shifting too: becoming hostile to privacy.

The people who liked Firefox because of its privacy stance, or because they were looking for an alternative to Big Tech, on the other hand, aren’t 100% likely to become a true believer, and those people are the critics. Often, those critics have been around for years going on decades.

Choose any combo

https://www.reddit.com/user/lo________________ol/comments/1f16i41/mozilla_freefall/

If Mozilla doesn’t discontinue a Mastodon server with under 300 people, how will it continue funding the $65 million AI and venture capital investments they’ve been making?! 😬

Just a little comment on 2021: It seems disingenuous, from their perspective. Steve Teixeira, In a lawsuit, is claiming that not only did Mozilla try to get him to fire employees who were disproportionately minorities, but they were within a group that was producing a profit for Mozilla.

In other words, Mozilla might have been preaching inclusivity publicly while practicing exclusivity privately.

You’re right, I may have over generalized. To me, this looked like pandering…

As with over things I dislike, seeing queer representationin it is better than queer exclusion from it. Rainbow capitalism, in general, is better queer-excluding capitalism, for example… but I just found this particular workshop to be rather tasteless, especially when nothing came out of it.

(When I say nothing, I mean for at least 3 years there was no output… The people behind this workshop created a road map, then released a collection of NFTs, and then the supposed AI model that would be created from it never materialized AFAICT.)