6 ms·

It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns over the opt-out policy i

by zaarn 9y ago

It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns over the opt-out policy in the mailing list and bugtracker but obviously that doesn't matter. What matters is that the original suggestion was opt-out. Of course, rightfully, nobody is going to send a message on the bugtracker or mailing list or otherwise participating to ensure this doesn't happen. Rather, everyone goes out and yells how terrible Mozilla is and how Google is being nice since they atleast tell you about it upfront. (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development) I don't think the blog post above accurately represents the current situation on the shield study nor does it reflect how several people engaged on it are trying to prevent this exact kind of PR disaster.

geofft 9y ago
This is, of course, the danger with running a project in public: you don't get to have a private discussion about whether a certain thing is a good idea, and you certainly don't get to have a private discussion about how to phrase it. Views of some individual proposing a thing get attributed to the organization. I can think of no better way to encourage closed development processes than to get upset at a "statement by a Mozilla person" and use it as a reason to write off the entire project. You have no idea what Google is saying about your privacy behind closed doors.
- mandelbulb 9y ago
  You're giving Mozilla a bit too much due. This was not just a statement or suggestion but an announcement for the next Monday. With an internal policy that all opt-out proposals requiring the transfer of personalized data must be discussed with the rest of the team (incl. PR) and publicly, the post would have sounded quite differently. By the way, in less than three hours, there will be an AMA on /r/firefox with the Project Manager of the User Advocacy team at Mozilla: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hosting_an_ama_on_friday_march_23rd_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hos...
  - geofft 9y ago
    Sure - but my reading of the article wasn't that it was so much objecting to the announcement but to the follow-up statement that Nightly users are implicitly opting in to a different privacy profile. That's the sort of statement I would easily see myself making to my team's private mailing list, and getting edited significantly before it goes into a public FAQ. I would expect that someone launching a similar experiment at Chrome/Edge/Safari/etc. would make a similar announcement, and then respond to internal feedback internally.
  - yati 9y ago
    Link to that AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/86lqx9/hi_rfirefox_i_am_a_mozilla_employee_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/86lqx9/hi_rfirefox...
- thegeomaster 9y ago
  FWIW, Chromium is also also developed in such a way that at least commits, code reviews, and discussions on issues are visible on the bug tracker.
acqq 9y ago
> The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns Wasn’t the famous “Looking Glass” an ad packed as a Shield study and delivered also to Firefox Developer version and even release (not even only Nightly)? I however don’t expect (and have never expected) Nightly to behave identically as the Release, so I don’t understand that some do expect that, like the OP. The Nightly is your contribution to the development, and obviously its use data aren’t supposed to be “super secret.”
- zaarn 9y ago
  While looking glass was indeed delivered in release (to my knowledge) the code was not active until configuration changes were made, at worst that means mozilla delivered unnecessary bloat to the user. While I do agree that Nightly is to some extend "we need crash reports with a list of all the pornhub tabs you had open", I think in this case they should inform users that they are doing this. The study only lasts a week so people can fallback to normal mozilla if they don't like the potential to be the 50% being "tracked". I hope Mozilla takes this as an opportunity to A) give the networking team a lecture on how to not word a shield study proposal and B) do something to avoid people thinking all shield studies are bad. They aren't. Because the option C) is "people should learn not to only read the first message in a proposal discussion and assume this is how they will do it" I find it unlikely that it will be possible, given the modern outrage culture in social media.
brador 9y ago
> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. Nothing else seems to be working. Some users are against Mozillas forced default tracking/telemetry system and forced install of crust that should really be add-ons (Pocket, sync). If you have any ideas for ways users can enable change which doesn't inconvenience you then please let them know.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Participate in the mailing lists, in the bug trackers. Submit code patches and report bugs. In short, participate in the Mozilla community. Mozilla isn't some sort of impenetrable wall of silence, everything they do is open. The initial mailing list thread that start the entire outrage is open. People on it raised these exact concerns. People engaged them. They want to prevent these exact PR disasters. "Nothing else seems to be working" is simply untrue if you simply look at the bugtracker and mailing list. I would suggest that you bring "Nothing else seems to be working" to Google and the Chrome dev team. I haven't heard much outcry from that direction yet and they regularly come up with decisions previously undiscussed with the public and then push it through no arguments about it. Mozilla is not like that no matter how much you want to believe it.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    > everything they do is open That is incorrect. Many bug reports are marked as private for security reasons. Other decisions such as Pocket, Cliqz and Mr Robot are made and executed in private. Once the code is thrown over the wall it's all open. Upstream of that is a different matter.
    - 9034725985 9y ago
      > Other decisions such as Pocket I am amazed that Mozilla has not yet released Pocket as free and open source software. What's going on?
      - sciurus 9y ago
belorn 9y ago
Here is a simple question, why do Mozilla not have a policy that dictate that any increase in data collection from one version to the next must either be opt-in or follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia), and a clear update to the privacy policy. Bureaucracy can be helpful in creating trust that important changes won't just sneak up on people unannounced.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia) Is this not exactly what is happening in the bug tracker and the mailing list?
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Certainly not 'lengthy', and I don't think "with the community". The initial state of this was two-day warning saying "this is happening Monday", which might count as prior notice but certainly isn't a dialogue.
- calcifer 9y ago
  > documented process with the community, in public You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.
  - irishsultan 9y ago
    The original announcement was: "FYI: We're going to do this, next monday", that announcement was on a Saturday. If you think that qualifies then we've different ideas about how this should get discussed. Even if they meant Monday 26th, that's not a lot of time to have a proper discussion.
  - belorn 9y ago
    So what does that process look like? Is there a formal process with clear method on how and when the decision is made, how it get propagate into a decision and how the documentation and announcement to users will be? Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list.
some_account 9y ago
I see this all the time also. Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version. Debate, yes, but not 'don't use nightly, sky is falling'.
- Macha 9y ago
  The reality is that they've given up on all other companies, so people are very sensitive to losing their one remaining chance of privacy, especially if that's the only reason they're using Firefox to begin with.
- amelius 9y ago
  > Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version. But, small question: isn't the Nightly an experimental version?
  - fedups 9y ago
    Yeah, and I would assume Nightly users would be more savvy about opting out in preferences if that's their wish.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      That doesn't make it okay for an opt-out privacy invading study to suddenly be included. You shouldn't silently get less privacy protections simply because you updated. You're right, Nightly users probably are more savvy so there's no need to decide for them. Lay out what the user's options are and force them to make a choice when the browser starts, don't have a default, and don't have an option preselected. All this crap has to do with what's okay to do in the absence of clear user intent. If you remove the possibility you don't have to worry.
mannykannot 9y ago
> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. I get the impression that people mostly just hope Mozilla will be better than the rest. Casting aspersions on others' motives doesn't help people like me figure out whether this is a big deal or not.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
> Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development Yes! I'm happy to see I'm not the only one to notice this... Chrome has become a new IE.
- oceanswave 9y ago
  Oh yeah because it’s been totally stagnant! Right guys? Oh because it reports all the telemetry by default back to Microsoft, oh shit that’s edge. Because it’s been breaking web standards and trying to make the world chrome rather than being a world player. Ah got it.
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    You're not getting it, the parent comment realized something I realized. Like Chrome adding API's that are unofficial or not supported whatsoever. There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
    - dhimes 9y ago
      There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE". Oh, no. That must be prevented. Like, if they made it so gmail and google docs only worked with Chrome, now that practically everybody has moved to gmail.... There would be no defense of such a move.
    - paulryanrogers 9y ago
      > There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE". IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns. But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser. My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.
krick 9y ago
Oh, I don't know. It seems Mozilla wants people to be outraged at itself. You may say that all this isn't reason enough, but I'm thinking that someday I was quite a Mozilla fanboy, and now I don't even know what browser to use… And it doesn't seem like I'm alone.
jasonvorhe 9y ago
> (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development) Care to elaborate on that?
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Presumably it's a reference to the way peak-usage IE created custom requirements and ignored established standards - partly to undermine other browsers, partly just because they were too big to care. Chrome defaulted top-level event listeners to passive with no real warning or discussion. Chrome no longer passes Acid 3 like it used to. I'm not a web-dev, but I know the list goes on at some length. So the concern here, whatever its merit, is that Chrome is now undermining other browsers and changing the web for its own benefit.
Kiro 9y ago
Just as it seems people simply want to be outraged at Facebook or Uber?
- Shish2k 9y ago
  People simply want to be outraged, period :/

by zaarn 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

This is, of course, the danger with running a project in public: you don't get to have a private discussion about whether a certain thing is a good idea, and you certainly don't get to have a private discussion about how to phrase it. Views of some individual proposing a thing get attributed to the organization. I can think of no better way to encourage closed development processes than to get upset at a "statement by a Mozilla person" and use it as a reason to write off the entire project. You have no idea what Google is saying about your privacy behind closed doors.

mandelbulb 9y ago
You're giving Mozilla a bit too much due. This was not just a statement or suggestion but an announcement for the next Monday. With an internal policy that all opt-out proposals requiring the transfer of personalized data must be discussed with the rest of the team (incl. PR) and publicly, the post would have sounded quite differently. By the way, in less than three hours, there will be an AMA on /r/firefox with the Project Manager of the User Advocacy team at Mozilla: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hosting_an_ama_on_friday_march_23rd_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hos...
- geofft 9y ago
  Sure - but my reading of the article wasn't that it was so much objecting to the announcement but to the follow-up statement that Nightly users are implicitly opting in to a different privacy profile. That's the sort of statement I would easily see myself making to my team's private mailing list, and getting edited significantly before it goes into a public FAQ. I would expect that someone launching a similar experiment at Chrome/Edge/Safari/etc. would make a similar announcement, and then respond to internal feedback internally.
- yati 9y ago
  Link to that AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/86lqx9/hi_rfirefox_i_am_a_mozilla_employee_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/86lqx9/hi_rfirefox...
thegeomaster 9y ago
FWIW, Chromium is also also developed in such a way that at least commits, code reviews, and discussions on issues are visible on the bug tracker.

acqq 9y ago

> The shield study isn't even running yet and several people have raised concerns Wasn’t the famous “Looking Glass” an ad packed as a Shield study and delivered also to Firefox Developer version and even release (not even only Nightly)? I however don’t expect (and have never expected) Nightly to behave identically as the Release, so I don’t understand that some do expect that, like the OP. The Nightly is your contribution to the development, and obviously its use data aren’t supposed to be “super secret.”

zaarn 9y ago
While looking glass was indeed delivered in release (to my knowledge) the code was not active until configuration changes were made, at worst that means mozilla delivered unnecessary bloat to the user. While I do agree that Nightly is to some extend "we need crash reports with a list of all the pornhub tabs you had open", I think in this case they should inform users that they are doing this. The study only lasts a week so people can fallback to normal mozilla if they don't like the potential to be the 50% being "tracked". I hope Mozilla takes this as an opportunity to A) give the networking team a lecture on how to not word a shield study proposal and B) do something to avoid people thinking all shield studies are bad. They aren't. Because the option C) is "people should learn not to only read the first message in a proposal discussion and assume this is how they will do it" I find it unlikely that it will be possible, given the modern outrage culture in social media.

brador 9y ago

> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. Nothing else seems to be working. Some users are against Mozillas forced default tracking/telemetry system and forced install of crust that should really be add-ons (Pocket, sync). If you have any ideas for ways users can enable change which doesn't inconvenience you then please let them know.

zaarn 9y ago
Participate in the mailing lists, in the bug trackers. Submit code patches and report bugs. In short, participate in the Mozilla community. Mozilla isn't some sort of impenetrable wall of silence, everything they do is open. The initial mailing list thread that start the entire outrage is open. People on it raised these exact concerns. People engaged them. They want to prevent these exact PR disasters. "Nothing else seems to be working" is simply untrue if you simply look at the bugtracker and mailing list. I would suggest that you bring "Nothing else seems to be working" to Google and the Chrome dev team. I haven't heard much outcry from that direction yet and they regularly come up with decisions previously undiscussed with the public and then push it through no arguments about it. Mozilla is not like that no matter how much you want to believe it.
- dingaling 9y ago
  > everything they do is open That is incorrect. Many bug reports are marked as private for security reasons. Other decisions such as Pocket, Cliqz and Mr Robot are made and executed in private. Once the code is thrown over the wall it's all open. Upstream of that is a different matter.
  - 9034725985 9y ago
    > Other decisions such as Pocket I am amazed that Mozilla has not yet released Pocket as free and open source software. What's going on?
    - sciurus 9y ago

belorn 9y ago

Here is a simple question, why do Mozilla not have a policy that dictate that any increase in data collection from one version to the next must either be opt-in or follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia), and a clear update to the privacy policy. Bureaucracy can be helpful in creating trust that important changes won't just sneak up on people unannounced.

Vinnl 9y ago
> follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia) Is this not exactly what is happening in the bug tracker and the mailing list?
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Certainly not 'lengthy', and I don't think "with the community". The initial state of this was two-day warning saying "this is happening Monday", which might count as prior notice but certainly isn't a dialogue.
calcifer 9y ago
> documented process with the community, in public You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.
- irishsultan 9y ago
  The original announcement was: "FYI: We're going to do this, next monday", that announcement was on a Saturday. If you think that qualifies then we've different ideas about how this should get discussed. Even if they meant Monday 26th, that's not a lot of time to have a proper discussion.
- belorn 9y ago
  So what does that process look like? Is there a formal process with clear method on how and when the decision is made, how it get propagate into a decision and how the documentation and announcement to users will be? Is there a formal policy document you can link me that defines the process how additional data collection are added in mozilla projects? It seems to me that what we have is a in-prompt discussion because people happen to detect a change and managed to raised the issue just before it went live. A formal process would make people trust the project that issues like this isn't depended on the chance that a data collection will be detected before it goes live and only then be brought to discussion in the public mailing list.

some_account 9y ago

I see this all the time also. Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version. Debate, yes, but not 'don't use nightly, sky is falling'.

Macha 9y ago
The reality is that they've given up on all other companies, so people are very sensitive to losing their one remaining chance of privacy, especially if that's the only reason they're using Firefox to begin with.
amelius 9y ago
> Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version. But, small question: isn't the Nightly an experimental version?
- fedups 9y ago
  Yeah, and I would assume Nightly users would be more savvy about opting out in preferences if that's their wish.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    That doesn't make it okay for an opt-out privacy invading study to suddenly be included. You shouldn't silently get less privacy protections simply because you updated. You're right, Nightly users probably are more savvy so there's no need to decide for them. Lay out what the user's options are and force them to make a choice when the browser starts, don't have a default, and don't have an option preselected. All this crap has to do with what's okay to do in the absence of clear user intent. If you remove the possibility you don't have to worry.

mannykannot 9y ago

> It seems people simply want to be outraged at Mozilla. I get the impression that people mostly just hope Mozilla will be better than the rest. Casting aspersions on others' motives doesn't help people like me figure out whether this is a big deal or not.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

> Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development Yes! I'm happy to see I'm not the only one to notice this... Chrome has become a new IE.

oceanswave 9y ago
Oh yeah because it’s been totally stagnant! Right guys? Oh because it reports all the telemetry by default back to Microsoft, oh shit that’s edge. Because it’s been breaking web standards and trying to make the world chrome rather than being a world player. Ah got it.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  You're not getting it, the parent comment realized something I realized. Like Chrome adding API's that are unofficial or not supported whatsoever. There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
  - dhimes 9y ago
    There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE". Oh, no. That must be prevented. Like, if they made it so gmail and google docs only worked with Chrome, now that practically everybody has moved to gmail.... There would be no defense of such a move.
  - paulryanrogers 9y ago
    > There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE". IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns. But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser. My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.

krick 9y ago

Oh, I don't know. It seems Mozilla wants people to be outraged at itself. You may say that all this isn't reason enough, but I'm thinking that someday I was quite a Mozilla fanboy, and now I don't even know what browser to use… And it doesn't seem like I'm alone.

jasonvorhe 9y ago

> (Completely ignoring that Google is steering Chrome into a new IE-Era of web development) Care to elaborate on that?

Bartweiss 9y ago
Presumably it's a reference to the way peak-usage IE created custom requirements and ignored established standards - partly to undermine other browsers, partly just because they were too big to care. Chrome defaulted top-level event listeners to passive with no real warning or discussion. Chrome no longer passes Acid 3 like it used to. I'm not a web-dev, but I know the list goes on at some length. So the concern here, whatever its merit, is that Chrome is now undermining other browsers and changing the web for its own benefit.

Kiro 9y ago

Just as it seems people simply want to be outraged at Facebook or Uber?

Shish2k 9y ago
People simply want to be outraged, period :/