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> But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money

Yeah, for 2 reasons.

1. Mozilla is a non-profit that takes donations.

2. These "money makers" make their money by tricking Mozilla users into selling their private data to advertisers.

And if you pay attention, you'll notice that people don't generally complain because Facebook gave us React or Llama. They complain about the facebook moneymaker of selling private data and advertising. But even then, they don't complain as much about facebook because facebook doesn't take donations.



Any other non profit maintaining an open source project gets passes bc "volunteers don't owe you anything" and "submit your own patch" catechisms.


I'm not sure I'm aware of any other non-profit open source software maintainer who pays the bills by selling users' data.

Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?


Mozilla doesn't sell user's data, they sell user's search traffic. Not the same, given that the latter requires a service rendered.


Mozilla does sell users' data. That's how the sponsored links and stories work

> Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking. [1]

While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.

And with firefox vpn, I'm sorry but that's a MITM. If you aren't paying a VPN provider, they are collecting and selling your data.

This is how every advert tracker works. They transparently and slowly gather data based on how you browse the internet. Just because firefox makes some efforts to slow it down, doesn't mean they aren't still participating in the market of selling user data.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy?utm_sou...


MozillaVPN is a paid service.




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