I see this as nothing more than a fun poke by Mozilla at the overwhelming majority of the technology industry—those who treat privacy as a nuisance at best and as a non-event at worst. Mozilla are giving people like myself the fun of clicking on the Amazon Echo or Google Home and voting "Super creepy," chuckling to ourselves about our virtuousness before closing the tab in Firefox.
I doubt they expect this page to be used by many laypeople. Maybe a few techies will toss a link out to their families as a rough crowdsourced assessment of the degree to which some popular devices respect user privacy. The inclusion of several nearly-unknown high-privacy options seems to be a reminder that there are alternatives; probably more difficult to use or less capable, but alternatives to the mainstream data-harvesting devices you see routinely advertised.
I think it's lighthearted fun intended to illustrate Mozilla's mission of being advocates for privacy, to a degree that we have become unfamiliar as a society in the age of everything-as-a-service.
Yeah, there are probably some inaccuracies. But frankly, unless you're selling a device that allows you to run the services on your own host using open source software (the way Mozilla does [1]), it's fair game to say that it's possible you are not sufficiently respecting user privacy. How can we as users be sure if all we can measure is that, indeed, the device sends data off-network to the "cloud?"
If you genuinely respect user privacy, you should allow a user to wholly own the data in the most pure form possible: they never send it to you.
I think it's an important list, even if somewhat sloppy. It would be to everyone's advantage if product reviewers like Consumer Reports, various tech columnists, blogs and so on, got the message that privacy matters. They need to start including privacy as a component of their review.
Pressure for companies to go green has worked over time; pressure for companies to go "quiet" -- that is pro-privacy -- could have the same effect.
I doubt they expect this page to be used by many laypeople. Maybe a few techies will toss a link out to their families as a rough crowdsourced assessment of the degree to which some popular devices respect user privacy. The inclusion of several nearly-unknown high-privacy options seems to be a reminder that there are alternatives; probably more difficult to use or less capable, but alternatives to the mainstream data-harvesting devices you see routinely advertised.
I think it's lighthearted fun intended to illustrate Mozilla's mission of being advocates for privacy, to a degree that we have become unfamiliar as a society in the age of everything-as-a-service.
Yeah, there are probably some inaccuracies. But frankly, unless you're selling a device that allows you to run the services on your own host using open source software (the way Mozilla does [1]), it's fair game to say that it's possible you are not sufficiently respecting user privacy. How can we as users be sure if all we can measure is that, indeed, the device sends data off-network to the "cloud?"
If you genuinely respect user privacy, you should allow a user to wholly own the data in the most pure form possible: they never send it to you.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services