4 ms·

For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Their brand is that the browser is on your side, I'm happy to have the defaults set accordi

by paulgb 9y ago

For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Their brand is that the browser is on your side, I'm happy to have the defaults set accordingly. (Edit: I should add that I think you're asking a very valid philosophical question that my opinion as a user of Firefox doesn't fully address)

qwerty456127 9y ago
From the practical point of view, I am afraid the trackers will respond a way if such a move is made on such a global level. Nobody was fighting AdBlock+ when it was only used by geeks and now as is it has gained so much attention there are a lot of sites that won't work if you use AdBlock+. Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it.
- fro0116 9y ago
  > Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it. This seems to imply that doNotTrack would have been successful for its intended purpose had it not been a default setting at one point, which feels like wishful thinking. Sure, that aspect made it impractical for uncharacteristically privacy-minded companies in the space to support the header, but the vast majority of companies in the business of tracking and advertising would have ignored it anyways, because there's zero consequence for not doing so.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Sites that do not work when using AdBlock+ are fighting back their money extorsion scheme (Adblock+ has this commericla program where if you pay them money they will whitelist your ads). Geeks ahve long moved to ublock origins or umatrix. Anyways 95% of the time you just have to disable scripts from the websites to unbreak them. do not track was never a good idea as respecting it was on a voluntary basis, meaning it was mostly an additional metrics to use to track and profile people who do not want to be tracked. It's a no brainer really that if you did not want to be tracked you should not enable it. Remember ghostery ? same thing all over again.
j_s 9y ago
> For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Firefox marketing is effective but to be clear they have begun changing direction, pursuing a more practical "attracting the masses" approach (a la Signal) rather than paranoid/hyper-vigilant/engineer-style idealism (something some misinterpret Firefox marketing as still claiming), and as a result Firefox has been forced to course-correct several times due to public outcry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 A recent eye-opener for me personally was discovering telemetry's switch from opt-in to opt-out as of September. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-default-shares-data-to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-de... (3 months ago) vs. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_by_default_on_normal_Firefox_releases.3F https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_... (3 years ago)
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I would not be surprised if the move to opt-out spying is consequences of the dropping ALSA and adding a hard dependency to pulseaudio fiasco. Telemetry has been held as one of the main justification for the change as it supposedly showed only a fraction of users used ALSA. It turned out to be a combination of misinterpretation of collected data (installed libpulse does not mean not using ALSA) and a complete ignorance of the real world (most linux distros disable telemetry because privacy, people using ALSA are often the same that take extra measures to protect their privacy hence disabling mozilla spying mechanisms). As a consequence mozilla pushed hard for package maintainers to enable telemetry in linux distros and sadly most did, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?id=b2b845f7ba35 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?... Compare to this from 7 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577 The fun part was when mozilla people started patronizing users for protecting their privacy and told them that it's their fault if ALSA got dropped and that they should relinquish their privacy instead or they will be ignored: Second, continuing to opt out of telemetry will just make problems like this worse. As was stated in this thread, one of the justifications for removing ALSA support was that the telemetry numbers showed a very little ALSA usage. If more ALSA users had telemetry enabled, perhaps the outcome would have been different. In any case, running without telemetry means not having a say in data-driven decisions about what configurations Mozilla should support. It's OK to disable telemetry (that's why it's user-controllable), but both users and distros that make decisions on users' behalf should to take into account that if don't let Firefox send info about your system config to Mozilla, your system config is invisible to Mozilla's decision making about what to support. source: Rationalising Linux audio backend support - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/jRAqSTri66I/2Lu7BX4SBgAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/j... There was no course correction here, ALSA is still out despite the issue being entirely to mozilla implementation and not ALSA abilities, despite this being an edge case for linux netflix users with a specific 5.1 setup and despite someone coming forward to offer to fix and maintain their broken code. Did I mention that they failed to mention this change in release notes, that firefox displayed a message inviting people to click a link to learn why their browser suddenly lost the ability to play sound but the link was broken and that this was an ESR release? So when I read some mozilla marketing PR about them pretending to champion user privacy, I'm nonplussed at best.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Branding and marketing and PR are just that, and the objective is to get a bigger market share. Actually it is to be the dominant browser on the market, mozilla name means mosaic killer, as in dethrone NCSA Mosaic and take its place as the n°1 browser by market share and was the internal name for netscape. They kept the name for the continuation of the effort though the target had moved to IE who actually took over Mosaic. Now the target is google chrome and the historical meaning is lost on most people but the intent is still to have the bigger market share because monies.

by paulgb 9y ago

qwerty456127 9y ago

From the practical point of view, I am afraid the trackers will respond a way if such a move is made on such a global level. Nobody was fighting AdBlock+ when it was only used by geeks and now as is it has gained so much attention there are a lot of sites that won't work if you use AdBlock+. Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it.

fro0116 9y ago
> Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it. This seems to imply that doNotTrack would have been successful for its intended purpose had it not been a default setting at one point, which feels like wishful thinking. Sure, that aspect made it impractical for uncharacteristically privacy-minded companies in the space to support the header, but the vast majority of companies in the business of tracking and advertising would have ignored it anyways, because there's zero consequence for not doing so.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Sites that do not work when using AdBlock+ are fighting back their money extorsion scheme (Adblock+ has this commericla program where if you pay them money they will whitelist your ads). Geeks ahve long moved to ublock origins or umatrix. Anyways 95% of the time you just have to disable scripts from the websites to unbreak them. do not track was never a good idea as respecting it was on a voluntary basis, meaning it was mostly an additional metrics to use to track and profile people who do not want to be tracked. It's a no brainer really that if you did not want to be tracked you should not enable it. Remember ghostery ? same thing all over again.

j_s 9y ago

> For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Firefox marketing is effective but to be clear they have begun changing direction, pursuing a more practical "attracting the masses" approach (a la Signal) rather than paranoid/hyper-vigilant/engineer-style idealism (something some misinterpret Firefox marketing as still claiming), and as a result Firefox has been forced to course-correct several times due to public outcry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 A recent eye-opener for me personally was discovering telemetry's switch from opt-in to opt-out as of September. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-default-shares-data-to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-de... (3 months ago) vs. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_by_default_on_normal_Firefox_releases.3F https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_... (3 years ago)

bigbugbag 9y ago
I would not be surprised if the move to opt-out spying is consequences of the dropping ALSA and adding a hard dependency to pulseaudio fiasco. Telemetry has been held as one of the main justification for the change as it supposedly showed only a fraction of users used ALSA. It turned out to be a combination of misinterpretation of collected data (installed libpulse does not mean not using ALSA) and a complete ignorance of the real world (most linux distros disable telemetry because privacy, people using ALSA are often the same that take extra measures to protect their privacy hence disabling mozilla spying mechanisms). As a consequence mozilla pushed hard for package maintainers to enable telemetry in linux distros and sadly most did, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?id=b2b845f7ba35 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?... Compare to this from 7 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577 The fun part was when mozilla people started patronizing users for protecting their privacy and told them that it's their fault if ALSA got dropped and that they should relinquish their privacy instead or they will be ignored: Second, continuing to opt out of telemetry will just make problems like this worse. As was stated in this thread, one of the justifications for removing ALSA support was that the telemetry numbers showed a very little ALSA usage. If more ALSA users had telemetry enabled, perhaps the outcome would have been different. In any case, running without telemetry means not having a say in data-driven decisions about what configurations Mozilla should support. It's OK to disable telemetry (that's why it's user-controllable), but both users and distros that make decisions on users' behalf should to take into account that if don't let Firefox send info about your system config to Mozilla, your system config is invisible to Mozilla's decision making about what to support. source: Rationalising Linux audio backend support - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/jRAqSTri66I/2Lu7BX4SBgAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/j... There was no course correction here, ALSA is still out despite the issue being entirely to mozilla implementation and not ALSA abilities, despite this being an edge case for linux netflix users with a specific 5.1 setup and despite someone coming forward to offer to fix and maintain their broken code. Did I mention that they failed to mention this change in release notes, that firefox displayed a message inviting people to click a link to learn why their browser suddenly lost the ability to play sound but the link was broken and that this was an ESR release? So when I read some mozilla marketing PR about them pretending to champion user privacy, I'm nonplussed at best.

bigbugbag 9y ago

Branding and marketing and PR are just that, and the objective is to get a bigger market share. Actually it is to be the dominant browser on the market, mozilla name means mosaic killer, as in dethrone NCSA Mosaic and take its place as the n°1 browser by market share and was the internal name for netscape. They kept the name for the continuation of the effort though the target had moved to IE who actually took over Mosaic. Now the target is google chrome and the historical meaning is lost on most people but the intent is still to have the bigger market share because monies.