Mozilla was doing so well with Firefox 57, I almost thought there would be a come back.
This is bad. Very bad.
How can they claim they care about privacy, now? Privacy and control was how they sold the product, now they've proven user have absolutely no control, and Mozilla doesn't respect its users.
They had the fucking permission, that's actually part of the problem. They ship Firefox with the "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" permission already enabled (bad bad bad).
And they did this shit for some promotion for a TV show. What a clusterfuck Mozilla, hope you learned your lesson.
At least one word of regret or even simple acknowledgement would be appropriate from Mr. Kaykas-Wolff. Reiterating that it's not a privacy issue is insulting to everybody who recognizes it as a privacy issue. Is collecting data the only way to breach privacy? Assume for the moment that it is. That means for example that everybody is totally okay with ransomware, which only writes to your hard drive. No, I think actually possibly maybe everybody's right. Can you get all caught-up first please, before you address the public?
I happen to like Mr. Robot but what happens when a show I dislike is pushed on me. Later on, it's 5 shows with a forced opt-out. After that, it's a bunch of other stuff with a convoluted way of opting out (similar to "installing" a 3rd-party search engine).
Mozilla says it's a show it's users like... This is the scariest statement from Mozilla so far. It's the kind of thing the Facebooks, the Googles and all the others are doing via their surveillance mechanisms.
After a while, the browser will be littered with Kardashian stuff because the majority will dictate the lowest common denominator.
Technically it was with permission, because people had shild program enabled in Firefox, it's a different story who enabled it, and why it re-enables after upgrade.
Does participating in a program to study potential improvements in Firefox equal permission to roll out advertising? I guess one could construe it as "experiment how people react to ads", but I doubt that's what those responsible had in mind.
I really don’t understand the negative sentiment. You’re trusting Mozilla to run code on your machine, and automatically push updates. Is there a substantive difference between updating FF binaries directly vs calling it an add on? Just not grokking it
> You're trusting Mozilla to run code on your machine
Right, and that's the problem: trust. I trust them to be responsible with the unfettered access I've given them. I trust them to only use that access for the things we've agreed upon: updates to the core browser and some specific data-collection to help them understand and improve how the product is being used.
Now they are using that channel to push advertisements onto my system without asking. They are overstepping the intended use of the update channel we had agreed upon in a very non-transparent manner. Makes me wonder if I can trust them.
I only gave them the ability to push automatic updates because I trusted them. If I can't trust them not to abuse the privilege I need to think about revoking the privilege and uninstalling Firefox.
Why do you think adding this through a regular update would not lead to negative reactions? Remember Pocket? (Which in contrast to this was well-communicated and an actual feature)
Because it was arbitrary and opaque? It was not apparent that there was a promotion being implemented by a feature of the browser not explicitly used for marketing. It introduces an trust problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730