PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big “yes, try it” button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool
https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676
So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it’s T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It’s like mozilla saying directly “we don’t care about your privacy”.
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I know … But people actually literally want this.
Maybe FF is what we install for normies while we use forks for other flavours.
But people actually literally want this.
No-one except advertisers want this.
Most people simply do not care at all.
Read the room
Why do advertisers want you to have tools that help you detect covert advertising?
In long term, for substituting them with their own links. In short term it’s a nice feature.
Because Mozilla takes a metric shitload of your data via fakespot such as (but not limited to)
Internet or other electronic network activity (e.g., browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
And then sells it to advertisers
Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.
I have large doubts on an AIs ability to reliably spot fakes.
AI: “This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it.”
There are literal bots on Reddit with less complexity able to measure the likelihood of a story being reliable and truthful, with facts and fact checkers. They’re not always right, they ARE useful though. Or were. Not sure about now, been over a year since I left.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of those AIs since the newfangled factcheck bot seems to just pull its data from a premade database, so no AI here on Lemmy
but it does not work. This stuff never does.
What do you mean by “this stuff?” Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.
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That won’t do for any even remotely normal user and you know that!
You’re saying that no remotely normal person would ever bother to download Fakespot free of charge if it wasn’t pushed at them through obnoxious in-browser advertising? And how much did Mozilla pay for this thing?
No, I did not say that. As evident by, well, what I wrote there.
No? What was your justification for building big and intrusive ads for Fakespot into Firefox then, if not that nobody would otherwise bother to go looking for it?
My mom would love that feature, and she wouldnt go looking for it.
Also that popup only appears when you click a tiny “shopping tag” icon in the adress bar, and THAT icon only appears on supported websites
Ah well, that’s not so bad as I feared (as an esr and librewolf user I won’t be seeing it for a while) but not so good as it might be. A little notification icon that appears when there’s an update to inform people of such things is traditional and makes more sense to me.
Showing it instead when you visit a particular site unfortunately reminds people likely to be unhappy about it that their web browser now contains features designed specifically for the benefit of a small list of supported web sites.
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Internet or other electronic network activity (e.g., browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)
Category of Third Parties to Whom Personal Information is Sold and/or Shared: Advertising partners, Service providers
Just a snippet of the privacy policy. There’s other bad stuff too like location tracking. It’s also all ran through Google analytics.
So much for a privacy respecting Mozilla
And people thought Mozilla became an ad company when they bought the other ad company. Nope. I’m tracing it back to right here.
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Average Windows enjoyer
I hope that Ladybirdy gets something good happening. I simply having a another browser in this space would give Mozilla a good sanity check for their direction and values. Otherwise they’re just kind of fumbling around.
There’s Verso now too, a Servo based browser.
FakeSpot is a hilarious company run by trend chasers, “crypto enthusiasts and web3 believers.”
If Mozilla chasing the AI trend isn’t bad enough, and their privacy policy doesn’t hurt your soul, FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
that also happen to be by far the most popular, and also where you are the mos likely to see fake reviews
“If the privacy invasion and corporate trend chasing doesn’t hurt your soul”?
Did you miss the privacy invasion where Mozilla now sells private data to advertising companies directly?
all the data that goes through the firefox integration is anonymised
We are talking about Mozilla FakeSpot, not Mozilla PPA…
I know, there’s so many privacy issues right now that it’s hard to keep track.
i am talking about fakespot
The letters “anon” don’t appear anywhere in the privacy policy.
So where are you pulling this claim from, because it doesn’t smell right…
Mozilla claims the service respects your privacy because they are using OHTTP (which does NOT provide anonymity)… The marketing speak implies anonymity heavily, but doesn’t say it
anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It’s very easy to accidentally leak useful information
they seem to be basically saying that they make most of their profit by selling your private data to advertisers, trend calculators etc etc
I puked a little when I read both names in the screenshot OP posted.
i did not get a pop up on a amazon page maybe a us only thing idk but its ironic how firefox advertises Privacy related feature
Yeah I’m thinking this might be a nightly experiment/recommended extension?
I’m in the US and don’t see it, so I don’t think it’s a thing, at least on the stable channel.
How does “waiving your right to a lawsuit” hidden in a terms and conditions apply? I bet it doesn’t
Seems like you can press the not now button
Not a big deal…
I consider it a big deal. I’m clicking “Not Now” buttons all day when I just want to use a piece of software for its main purpose. And then because it says “Not Now” I get asked again and again and again.
Hot take and I can guarantee this will be downvoted but I think people are putting way too much blind trust into Mozilla for this.
They just purchased an advertising company, they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit. They keep giving their CEO raises and laying off their workers. Mozilla is actively enshittifying but people don’t react until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.
Whether you think the feature is useful or not, Firefox is unfortunately shifting away from being a privacy-focused user-focused browser. The saving grace is that it is open source and forks can be made of it, “Firefox” itself can survive anything as long as there’s enough interest to keep it alive
I think that Mozilla does great work, but they’ve lost sight of their goals, and are changing focus. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this needs to be looked at objectively instead of with brand-loyalty. At the end of the day, they’re just another company with financial interests prioritized over user interests.
What irks me is that they proudly announce that these features are baked in directly in the browser. Why the FUCK would they do that? I want my browser to be a browser only. Everything else must be relegated to an optional add-on.
until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.
That’s a common misconception. If frogs are thrown into boiling water they almost die instantly, if they are placed in a pot that’s slowly beginning to boil, they desperately try to escape after a while
Huh, that is a surprising new revelation.
they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit
Fakespot did already have that before they got acquired. Which doesn’t mean it’s not worth changing, of course.
Hot take
Thats not a hot take anymore. A lot of people in privacy communities are moving to forks of Firefox that disable Mozilla’s bullshit.
You can opt out of it?
Which forks?
Mullvad browser for me
Ooh. Thanks
Thank you.
On desktop I’ve been using Librewolf, Mullvad Browser is good too. There’s also some forks on Android, Mull and Fennec, of those I prefer Mull
Edit: Waterfox is another fork on desktop but they had some controversy when bought by an advertising company, but they’re independent again as of last year
Fennec
isn’t fennec a 1:1 rebuild? I believe it still has everything turned on
What even would be the purpose of such software?
rebuild for distribution on fdroid as not to violate trademarks
It has some of the proprietary stuff and telemetry removed
What would you recommend for Android?
Also, have you found anything that works well with Firefox Sync? I use Sync for my bookmarks but it doesn’t seem to be able to sync with LibreWolf
I’d recommend Mull, it’s pretty much Librewolf for Android
As for the syncing I’m not sure
I know Librewolf says that. I have tried to use Sync but after signing into my Mozilla account Librewolf doesn’t recognise me as logged in and doesn’t sync.
Do the same browser plugins work on librewolf?
Yes. Out of the box, it has uBlock Origin installed.
Thank you.
Commenting to check these out later
@DoucheBagMcSwag @nia_the_cat Did you checked it?
Mullvad Browser (Tor Browser without onion network), Librewolf, Arkenfox (not a fork, just hardes regulär Firefox and disables mozilla’s telemetry)
I downloaded it but the option to come back to where I left off when I close the program was greyed out. I’m a tab-a-holic and I don’t like that. Any comments about that?
man why do people always label the most cold-ass takes in the universe as hot takes
Depending where you are it is. On some Mozilla communities you’re downvoted into oblivion or dogpiled on for saying this. I was pleasantly surprised here that it wasn’t, I’m pretty new to this one.
A lot of them are very fanboy heavy
didn’t the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this
Actually I thought there new ceo said they were going to fuck around with AI stuff.
Edit:
At this point, I’m glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don’t miss Firefox one bit.
Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I’m still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?
On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.
Mullvad Browser is pretty good on desktop.
Lots of love for librewolf here.
Strong fingerprint resistance breaks a lot of sites so just get used to disabling that on whatever sites.
Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don’t notice any other differences on my phone
Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork?
I don’t understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.
It’s not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it’s just a slight change in design and a different icon
Yes, it’s Firefox without the bullshit.
It’s ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.
When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built “Phoenix,” much, much later becoming Firefox.
Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don’t look at my company’s Jira, TYVM! 😑 ) is cleared.
I’m starting to worry about Mozilla. Firefox is still the best browser, and I’ve used it for many years… but there are more and more anti-features popping up that require a few settings to be changed. No one thing is a big deal, but I’m starting to feel the same way about Firefox as I did about Windows before I stopped using it: like it’s just trying to trick me into doing something I don’t want to do rather than aiming to be a good product.
I’m thinking specifically about the address bar getting ‘search suggestions’ from Google by default; and the special ‘ad effectiveness tracking’ that is turned on by default to help Facebook. Privacy should always be the default setting. We shouldn’t have to keep up-to-date with the latest features and settings just so that we know what to disable!
Firefox is gone for me. Too long with minor issues hanging around while they focus on the issues above.
Let me browse, bookmark, and thats pretty much it. Allowing me to save passwords okay fine but all that other stuff just no way
Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
Oh right, you enshittified yourself.
You are not wrong. I got curious how much they receive in donations, but could not find anything about it in their financial statements.
That is where I looked and could not find it, albeit only on my short commute from work.
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For the new AI review feature, we are the product not the customers.
