As of September 19th, 2024, Webacy is still listed in the Mozilla Venture Capital portfolio:
As of September 19th, 2024, Webacy is still listed in the Mozilla Venture Capital portfolio:
Title changed. Can you explain your offense at not having [2023] in the title? Other people actually had a reason to complain, but you did not.
There’s already a thread regarding this article’s age in this post
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
https://orbitbymozilla.com/privacy