I more meant that the average user actually wants a significant amount of data collection and telemetry, as part of their normal web usage. There are some true privacy geeks who are actually maintaining near-anonymity on the modern internet, but there's a lot of people who get riled up about things like this while using Android phones, or signing up for loyalty programs, using corporate social media, etc.
verdigris
joined 4 years ago
You're not totally wrong here, but the fact is that these updates are a complete non-issue that has only resulted in so much backlash because of the self-selected Firefox audience of people who know enough about tech and privacy to care, but not enough to understand what's actually threatening. The updates were a minor change in language that didn't change the status quo, but idiots like the guy who thinks that incognito mode somehow stops a site from gathering information on you flock to these articles and start crying doomsday.
Mozilla is the only big web company that's even close to on the side of consumers and it's sad to see them eat shit for no reason.
Which is a ridiculous thing to want for most users and exposes how little so much of the self-identified "techie" crowd actually understands about how this stuff works.
What do you think a browser does?
The terms were never actually bad. This is them responding to the backlash, yes, but that's just because everyone freaked out over nothing. They're not "rolling back" anything, and this comment is just more disinformation.
I assume because either their legal department, or it sounds like maybe this new exec Varma, thought that the previous language opened them up to potential liability in some jurisdictions.
The brightline for me is when the terms actually become onerous. If you were an extreme privacy nerd you were already using a fork anyway, for the average user there's nothing in the terms that's threatening yet IMO.
Everyone keeps saying this, but no one has an answer for why, if they're definitely going to start selling all our data, they didn't say that in the new terms? I'll get upset when they actually change them to be shitty.
Cool cool, lumping "I love fascists, actually" together with "We're clarifying our legal positions"
No, but that's a local program processing and saving data entirely on your system. It's a world of difference from what a web browser does, which is oversee a whole suite of protocols connecting you to remote servers and transmitting data back and forth in requests that build on and reference each other. With the complexity of modern web interactions, there's a ton of reasons why a browser might need to store your data and share it with others, even ignoring profit-seeking motives.
And let's remember that the last thing Mozilla got heat for was the introduction of a method to anonymize bulk user data for sharing & selling purposes, as opposed to the granular, extremely invasive tracking that 99% of websites are doing these days.
I see a company that needs to make a decent amount of money in a crazy competitive environment, that's trying their best to do so in the way least destructive to user privacy and choice.