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> Pocket is also experimenting with personalizing recommendations for certain users based partly on each person’s Firefox browsing history. Why does an open-so

• infinityplus1 8y ago
  Pocket is owned by Mozilla.
  • wildrhythms 8y ago
    Pocket is proprietary and owned by Mozilla.
    • zaarn 8y ago
      The client side is fully open sourced and to my knowledge there is work ongoing to opensource the server too.
• wodenokoto 8y ago
  Mozilla owns pocket.
  • mort96 8y ago
    Yeah, it's Mozilla's proprietary cloud synchronization service.
    • zaarn 8y ago
      Cloud Sync is not proprietary, you can run your own with all functionality that Mozilla's provides, the code is on Github.
      • mort96 8y ago
        This is about Pocket, which is what krn referred to as "a proprietary cloud synchronization service". Mozilla has been promising to make Pocket open source since it acquired it over 1.5 years ago, but haven't done it yet.
        • zaarn 8y ago
          There is plenty of client source code available on github, the remaining parts are the server which understandably might pose some issues if it contains either patents or third party proprietary code.
          • mort96 8y ago
            Yeah, the clients are open source, and they're interfacing with the proprietary cloud service. Just like krn said.
            • zaarn 8y ago
              Atleast part of the cloud service is open source (mozilla's side) and they are still planning to open source them. Until evidence of the contrary surfaces I do believe Mozilla when they say that.
              • krn 8y ago
                A trustworthy open source company doesn't bundle its product with a service its users have no control over.
• pietroglyph 8y ago
  Mozilla actually owns pocket now; they seem to believe that giving people recommendations from around the web is the best way to combat walled gardens who want all your content going through them. This article is pretty revealing: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... I still don't think it should be proprietary, and I don't use it, so extensions.pocket.enabled = false is my friend.
  • swiley 8y ago
    I wish that where off by default, it actually makes me feel uncomfortable installing firefox on my laptop at work even though it really is better than chrome when you want to read docs and don't have a ton of free memory.
    • infinityplus1 8y ago
      So, what do you use? Chrome is more comfortable?
      • swiley 8y ago
        Yes, chrome doesn't dump news articles on my screen every time I open a new tab. I use firefox anyway, it just makes me uncomfortable.
        • foepys 8y ago
          Chrome on Android does. Although you can now hide it since a few weeks ago.
        • supuun 8y ago
          you can easily customize that
        • guu 8y ago
          Turn off site recommendations: https://help.getpocket.com/article/1147-hiding-pocket-in-your-firefox-new-tab https://help.getpocket.com/article/1147-hiding-pocket-in-you... Disabling Pocket: https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-save-to-pocket-features-in-firefox https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-save-to-po...
• lozenge 8y ago
  All browsing history is kept on your device and recommendations are calculated on your device. The only cloud synchronization is the recommendation engine - no different to the existing synchronizations like the update checker or the phishing sites list.
  • hnaccy 8y ago
    They phone home with the recommendations which leaks info about your browsing history.
    • kibwen 8y ago
      Source? That's contrary to everything I've seen.
      • hnaccy 8y ago
        >When you use Firefox, Mozilla by default collects technical and interaction data. You can read about the data we collect and how you can choose what you share in the Firefox Privacy Notice. >If your Firefox is configured to share this technical and interaction data with Mozilla, when Recommendations from Pocket are displayed on your new tab, we collect information about how many times they appear and whether or not you interact with them. >This reports all the Pocket recommended articles (a list of ids) when the user opens a newtab. https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-recommendations https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco... https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/blob/master/docs/v2-system-addon/data_events.md https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/blob/master/docs/...
        • busrf 8y ago
          The sentence following your second quote is: >However, this information is not associated with any of the other technical and interaction information about you or your copy of Firefox. Are you concerned about collection of anonymized metrics, or do you have some reason to believe that the data collected is not anonymized?