Let's talk about the knee-jerk reaction we are all probably having right now: "Muh privacy!" It's hard not to have that reaction. A couple days ago there was

Let's talk about the knee-jerk reaction we are all probably having right now: "Muh privacy!" It's hard not to have that reaction. A couple days ago there was a front page post on HN about the DNS-Over-HTTPS features that Mozilla is experimenting with. Mozilla has this storied history of community reactions. So perhaps we can all be forgiven for being on edge with Firefox. Our news feed makes it seem like Mozilla is out to get you. And yet, none of these stories ever end up bearing fruit. How often has Mozilla _actually_ violated your privacy. When rubber meets the road, Firefox is in many ways the most pro-user-privacy browser on the market. Not to mention all the other work that Mozilla does. Common Voice (https://voice.mozilla.org/en https://voice.mozilla.org/en) is an amazing project that could completely change the game for user privacy in the IoT industry. Let's Encrypt stepped up the level of encryption on the internet by an order of magnitude, and it did so for free when everyone else was gouging us. Rust is making many bugs a thing of the past, which will lead to far fewer instances of user data being leaked by security bugs. Yet through all this work that Mozilla does to fight _for_ you, they get shit on by news articles and in these comment sections. Meanwhile Chrome, which we _know_ is harvesting our data, gets no news. Perhaps it is because we hold Mozilla to a higher standard. We are used to Google's abuse with Chrome, so we don't talk about it. But any move by Mozilla that could possibly be misconstrued as them becoming corrupt raises all our alarms. Or perhaps the Firefox team is simply struggling with PR. After all, these last two news worthy incidences are really just issues with communication. Firefox _isn't_ sending all your DNS queries and browsing history off into wonderland. These are experiments. But it seems like a lot of people miss that point. So maybe it's just a communication issue. Or maybe this all has to do with Mozilla being open. When Google experiments, they do so mostly in secret. Mozilla's transparency might be making them easy targets for sloppy news. Either way, my point is that a lot of us are happy to throw Mozilla under the bus at the slightest hint of corruption, but we never take the time to appreciate the good work they've done (for free, by the way).