Mozilla adds stupid AI stuff with horrible T&C
PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big "yes, try it" button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool
https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676
So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it's T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It's like mozilla saying directly "we don't care about your privacy".
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I hate the anti-pattern of "Not Now". How about "No"?
Yeah, corporate dark patterns really don't respect consent. When would you like to know more: Now, or Later?
Though I don't mind the "accept, deny, ask me again later" for when something seems interesting but I don't want to put the effort into looking into it right at the moment but don't want to click yes without looking into it.
These should be the norm, actually.
Yes, though it stops being as good if there's a "you can postpone this n more times" involved.
Best I can do is accepting three options: "Yes," "No," and "Remind me later."
"Not now" or "No, I don't want this awesome feature" bullshit infuriates me.
These should be flatly illegal. No means no
We had a whole generation of people that were taught that 'no' means 'maybe later' (the whole point of the 'no means no' ads about daterapes), and that same generation is now running these companies. What did we expect to happen?
Hot take and I can guarantee this will be downvoted but I think people are putting way too much blind trust into Mozilla for this.(edit: Apparently not here, pleasantly surprised at that)They just purchased an advertising company, they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit. They keep giving their CEO raises and laying off their workers. Mozilla is actively enshittifying but people don't react until it's too late because it's a boiling frog situation.
Whether you think the feature is useful or not, Firefox is unfortunately shifting away from being a privacy-focused user-focused browser. The saving grace is that it is open source and forks can be made of it, "Firefox" itself can survive anything as long as there's enough interest to keep it alive.
I think that Mozilla does great work, but they've lost sight of their goals, and are changing focus. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this needs to be looked at objectively instead of with brand-loyalty. At the end of the day, they're just another company with financial interests prioritized over user interests.
Thats not a hot take anymore. A lot of people in privacy communities are moving to forks of Firefox that disable Mozilla's bullshit.
Which forks?
On desktop I've been using Librewolf, Mullvad Browser is good too. There's also some forks on Android, Mull and Fennec, of those I prefer Mull
Edit: Waterfox is another fork on desktop that had some controversy when bought by an advertising company, but they're independent again as of last year
Do the same browser plugins work on librewolf?
Yes. Out of the box, it has uBlock Origin installed.
isn't fennec a 1:1 rebuild? I believe it still has everything turned on
What even would be the purpose of such software?
rebuild for distribution on fdroid as not to violate trademarks
It has some of the proprietary stuff and telemetry removed
What would you recommend for Android?
Also, have you found anything that works well with Firefox Sync? I use Sync for my bookmarks but it doesn't seem to be able to sync with LibreWolf
I'd recommend Mull, it's pretty much Librewolf for Android
As for the syncing I'm not sure
I know Librewolf says that. I have tried to use Sync but after signing into my Mozilla account Librewolf doesn't recognise me as logged in and doesn't sync.
Thank you.
Commenting to check these out later
@DoucheBagMcSwag @nia_the_cat Did you checked it?
I'm actually trying IceRaven right now
Mullvad Browser (Tor Browser without onion network), Librewolf, Arkenfox (not a fork, just hardes regulär Firefox and disables mozilla's telemetry)
I downloaded it but the option to come back to where I left off when I close the program was greyed out. I'm a tab-a-holic and I don't like that. Any comments about that?
I think mullvad browser uses always icognito so it does not save any site data to disk. I think it is not adapted to your use case.
Mullvad browser for me
Thank you.
Ooh. Thanks
You can opt out of it?
What irks me is that they proudly announce that these features are baked in directly in the browser. Why the FUCK would they do that? I want my browser to be a browser only. Everything else must be relegated to an optional add-on.
Fakespot did already have that before they got acquired. Which doesn't mean it's not worth changing, of course.
man why do people always label the most cold-ass takes in the universe as hot takes
Depending where you are it is. On some Mozilla communities you're downvoted into oblivion or dogpiled on for saying this. I was pleasantly surprised here that it wasn't
A lot of them are very fanboy heavy
That's a common misconception. If frogs are thrown into boiling water they almost die instantly, if they are placed in a pot that's slowly beginning to boil, they desperately try to escape after a while
Huh, that is a surprising new revelation.
They are burning money
AFAIK this is the result of their acquisition of fakespot.com
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/02/mozilla-buys-fakespot-identifies-fake-reviews-shopping-tools-firefox/
Ohh, Good point, so the entire trust model is we are trusting Mozilla not to share data with Mozilla, because if Mozilla colludes with Mozilla then there is no privacy here at all.
Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
Oh right, you enshittified yourself.
Edit to add: Why give them money when they apparently already have too much of it from corporate inputs (most of it from Google)? I think they ask us for donations in order to retain their non-profit image, for PR purposes.
You are not wrong. I got curious how much they receive in donations, but could not find anything about it in their financial statements.
Look here
That is where I looked and could not find it, albeit only on my short commute from work.
LibreWolf
Librewolf.net
didn't the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this
Actually I thought there new ceo said they were going to fuck around with AI stuff.
Edit:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/?guccounter=1
At this point, I'm glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don't miss Firefox one bit.
Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I'm still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?
Lots of love for librewolf here.
Strong fingerprint resistance breaks a lot of sites so just get used to disabling that on whatever sites.
On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.
Mullvad Browser is pretty good on desktop.
Isn't Mull basicslly Firefox since it's just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don't notice any other differences on my phone
Yes, it's Firefox without the bullshit.
It's ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.
When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built "Phoenix," much, much later becoming Firefox.
I don't understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.
It's not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it's just a slight change in design and a different icon
Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don't look at my company's Jira, TYVM! 😑 ) is cleared.
Fakespot is from Mozilla, if you trust Mozilla, why don't you trust Fakespot?
And why is it useless? With the amount of fake AI reviews an AI to detect them is not completely useless.
But the popup is annoying.
People shouldn't trust Mozilla either. It's a company that does company things. Just because it's not as far-gone as Google doesn't mean it's incapable.
I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.
The fact that the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, despite wherever controversy there may be around their decisions of late, is a pretty significant factor.
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Even worse, the majority of its revenue comes from Google for making it the default search engine.
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Using AI to detect AI is completely useless. It's been a big issue in academics, where a professor will plug your essay into an AI detector and then you get dinged for plagiarism because your entirely handwritten essay gets marked as AI. It's just glorified pattern matching, it has no concept of real or fake.
If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.
It's not useless. It's just that it's bloatware that's unnecessary for many.
Like a car with a bright orange "Order Bird Food" button in the middle of the dashboard. If you don't own any birds, then it sucks.
Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.
Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.
Sadly this type of bloat sells as "features" to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I'm not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.
Sure, sure, other browsers do it. But I expected more of Mozilla.
Pocket was already bad enough, but it was kiiiiinda related to browsing anyway - it was a glorified bookmarking tool. It had a nice purpose too - save pages for online reading - but they seem to have gotten rid of that and I'm mad about it.
Shouldn't trust Fakespot or Mozilla
Lol who the f trusts Mozilla nowadays?
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that also happen to be by far the most popular, and also where you are the mos likely to see fake reviews
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they seem to be basically saying that they make most of their profit by selling your private data to advertisers, trend calculators etc etc
all the data that goes through the firefox integration is anonymised
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i am talking about fakespot
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Mozilla claims the service respects your privacy because they are using OHTTP (which does NOT provide anonymity)... The marketing speak implies anonymity heavily, but doesn't say it
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality
anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It's very easy to accidentally leak useful information
I puked a little when I read both names in the screenshot OP posted.
Average Windows enjoyer
AI shit alone, I never understood the urge to build a whole OS in the browser. I want my browser to view websites. If I want more, then I can install extensions. I'd rather them release this as some sort of "official" extension. Might switch to LibreWolf (do you have any other suggestions?)
"strategic partnerships"
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality
Here is a talk on OHTTP (OHAI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HEzpnktAwY
and a OHTTP recap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjLwo4Ufp8s
Basically, if you trust the OHTTP Proxy (mozilla) and the OHTTP service provider (fakespot) to not collude, then OHTTP protects your data.
If you think Mozilla and fakespot might collude, then this doesn't give you any privacy. (Update - Someone pointed out Mozilla has purchased fakespot, so this comes down to Trusting mozilla with 100% of your data for their privacy promise and OHTTP is totally pointless here)
Depends on your threat model.
If they actually cared about privacy they would have the OHTTP model, sure, but also a TOR hidden service endpoint that anyone could use as well ; Removing all the links between the user and the service shouldn't be a problem, since they are not monitizing user behavior, right? RIGHT?!?!?
Mozilla says they use a third-party OHTTP intermediary. In the blog post linked above, they name Fastly as their partner. So it's not as bad as Mozilla + Mozilla-wearing-funny-glasses.
Personally, I still think this is the wrong approach to privacy, even though I've used Fakespot on my own many times over the years. Largely because I don't think any of this needs to be built into a web browser.
I would prefer my web browser to minimize information leakage by default, to the greatest degree that it can while still remaining useful as a web browser. Mozilla keeps adding bloat to Firefox, and bloat always comes at a cost. I'd much prefer these to be browser extensions that people can download if they want them, rather than built in by default. The baseline Firefox should be lean. Less "stuff" = smaller attack surface. Simplicity is best.
I mean, the Fakespot browser extension has existed for a long time, and I've never seriously considered installing it. I'd much rather just take an extra three seconds to load their web site and paste in a URL than have it constantly monitoring my activity and doing god-knows-what with it. That way I have better knowledge and control of what is happening with my data. Even if I trust their intentions, I don't implicitly trust their competence (all software has bugs) and I don't trust that they will never go rogue in the future.
And also, I just don't find this claim all that compelling in principle:
I mean...sure. That's fair. Buuuuuut handing half the data to your "partner" doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence. Especially since literally nobody reads all of the privacy policies they are subject to. See:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/04/19/150905465/to-read-all-those-web-privacy-policies-just-take-a-month-off-work
https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/you-need-a-whole-workweek-every-month-to-read-privacy-policiesand-thats-bad-news
Minimizing privacy policies should be a high-priority goal for any organization that claims to value privacy.
Furthermore, how many additional parties have access (legally or otherwise) to both Mozilla and Fastly? 🤷
I remember when Firefox was brand new over 20 years ago and one of the reasons for creating it was the main Mozilla browser had too much feature bloat so it was stripped down to just a browser and if you wanted more features you could add them in as extensions, putting just what you wanted in the browser and leaving out what you didn’t. It was great! Eventually Firefox became more popular so Mozilla switched their efforts to it and they’ve been jamming more things that used to be extensions in as features and bloating it full of features I don’t want. It’s one of the reasons I started using Chrome in the early days of Chrome but then of course that and Google started getting worse so I switched back to Firefox, but it still has its problems.
i would like to see mozilla making all of these features as full fledged browser extensions (installed by default, sure why not, but uninstallable at user request)
I don't trust Mozilla one single bit with my data as long as they have an advertising network enabled by default and use pingback telemetry for ALL actions you do in the browser by default that can only be turned off by changing multiple "hidden"
about:configsettings.Wait, where does it say that Mozilla is the third-party intermediary server?
It doesn't, but when modeling threats we have to go be capabilities and not intentions.
If we're going by capabilities, then your browser maker can already see everything you do in that browser.
I dislike doublespeak
I actually use fakespot a lot, but will never install an add-on for this.
I got that notice a few months ago, but I didn't use either button on the bottom. I used the X on the top, and haven't seen it since.
I thought we were done with the age of Toolbars, but here we are, back there. An app or add-on for every damn thing. No, I don't want this integrated into my browser. No, I don't need your HTML5 app on my phone to do less than the webpage does. No, I don't want your spyware app to view the one-off Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram link a friend sends me. No, I don't mean 'maybe later', I mean 'no forever'.
The upside is that if you're ever prompted to install a thing to your browser to use a site's features, it's because the built-in sandbox is too restrictive for what they want. It's an immediate red flag.
I also view prompts to "use our (phone) app" the same way. I'm already seeing your site, in my browser, with ten different kinds of adblock and tampermonkey scripts running. I already have what I want, and I'm not letting you anywhere near my data plan.
Clearly, it's time for a "no means no" extension.
But the thing is, most people don't think twice about it, and just go, "meh, why not, what's the harm?" and install it, which tells those scummy summersons that "we" want this, and they keep pushing it, and making their site more and more useless without it, to the point, where 'desktop view' no longer works (I'm looking at you, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, to name a few).
I never explain exactly why. I skirt. "my phone isn't compatible with your app", "I don't have a modern smartphone that works with your app", "I don't install apps on my phone", "I don't have space on my phone for your app", "I only a work phone, and I'm not allowed to install anything", and so on. They don't care about your privacy, so don't give it as a reason. "it's not about privacy, I'm just poor".
The real reason people want to revoke the second amendment is so Mozilla will stop constantly pointing guns at their own feet.
Please tell me there's an about:config setting to turn this bs off.
I got this linked on Mastodon: https://kitsunes.club/notes/9wbyqywt28
Nice. Thank you. For those who don't click the link, it appears you can disable by setting these flags:
browser.shopping.experience2023.activeand:
browser.shopping.experience2023.survey.enabledTo false.
EDIT: On finally getting back to my desktop and disabling these, it looks like there's a bunch of these
browser.shopping.experience2023flags. Some of them set to true, others false, I just set them all to false.What are the right settings to disable that crap via
user.js? I assume this is done via hidden extension, like Pocket.I actually love Fakespot. I've had it installed as an extension for years, but now it's native
And that's the bullshit part. It shouldn't be native. A browser should be a browser.
Why do you think it's useless?
If someone wanted it, they could've installed the Firefox extension, but now for users who doesn't want this, they have an intrusive feature that is just a bloat. Also, even if I wanted it, it's fairly useless unless you live in western countries.
Can you opt out?
I beluga there is an
about:configsetting to disable it. You can find more details somewhere in the comments of this post or the original post that I quoted.apt remove firefox (or via pacman, windows settings etc)
Otherwise should be a bunch of flags you can set in about:config
Okay, but why do you think it's useless?
Because not many people from somewhere like greece shop on walmart or best buy, and many people who use Firefox also are anti amazon
Hmm, that might be a bug - it looks like it was only meant to be available in the US. I've never seen it, at least.
It's not a bug. I don't think they saw it. They just need something to be angry about.
For the same reasons as the shitty AI for detecting AI produced essays.
i did not get a pop up on a amazon page maybe a us only thing idk but its ironic how firefox advertises Privacy related feature
Yeah I'm thinking this might be a nightly experiment/recommended extension?
Prob
I'm in the US and don't see it, so I don't think it's a thing, at least on the stable channel.
Oh
I've used Firefox since it was released. I will be considering other browsers due to this. I do not want AI in my products.
Librewolf and Floorp are good Firefox based alternative browsers.
Thanks, these look interesting. I've been using Firefox forever for my personal browsing (but Edge for work) and I'd prefer to stay with it if I can.
What other browsers? Firefox was the last good one.
Since Firefox is free and open source, there are many other variations of it built and distributed by the community.
I don't think AI is what's wrong here...
Different priorities for different people. The AI is what I really have an issue with right now. I'm sick of it being shoved down everyone's throats, and I have big ethical concerns about it in general.
For the new AI review feature, we are the product not the customers.
Oh they're finally integrating fake spot? That's awesome, actually! Pretty cool plugin, that!
Sure, Mozilla customer representative #37.
Must be an easy world where anyone disagreeing with you has to always be a shill. Gets you around annoying concepts such as arguments, discussions or opinions.
Nah my good shill. I've had very interesting discussions about contrarian points in the past, and they've been enlightening. This one is..... I mean, if you're really not a shill, then be aware that baking that feature into a web browser is selfishly unnecessary.
and its behind OHTTPS so your usage of it is completely anonymized
anonymized data can be re-identified
IANAL, but I don't think T&Cs are really legally binding and can be easily fought against in court.
While true, it requires time and money to get a case before the court. Which most people don't have. If your rights require you to invest your time and money against a much larger adversarial party in court, then it's not your rights that are being protected in the first place. Right now Big Tech is more worried about us exercising our rights instead of being afraid of trampling on them in the first place.
I'm starting to worry about Mozilla. Firefox is still the best browser, and I've used it for many years... but there are more and more anti-features popping up that require a few settings to be changed. No one thing is a big deal, but I'm starting to feel the same way about Firefox as I did about Windows before I stopped using it: like it's just trying to trick me into doing something I don't want to do rather than aiming to be a good product.
I'm thinking specifically about the address bar getting 'search suggestions' from Google by default; and the special 'ad effectiveness tracking' that is turned on by default to help Facebook. Privacy should always be the default setting. We shouldn't have to keep up-to-date with the latest features and settings just so that we know what to disable!
Firefox is gone for me. Too long with minor issues hanging around while they focus on the issues above.
Let me browse, bookmark, and thats pretty much it. Allowing me to save passwords okay fine but all that other stuff just no way
How does "waiving your right to a lawsuit" hidden in a terms and conditions apply? I bet it doesn't
I know ... But people actually literally want this.
Maybe FF is what we install for normies while we use forks for other flavours.
No-one except advertisers want this.
Most people simply do not care at all.
Why do advertisers want you to have tools that help you detect covert advertising?
In long term, for substituting them with their own links. In short term it's a nice feature.
Because Mozilla takes a metric shitload of your data via fakespot such as (but not limited to)
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
And then sells it to advertisers
Read the room
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Just a snippet of the privacy policy. There's other bad stuff too like location tracking. It's also all ran through Google analytics.
So much for a privacy respecting Mozilla
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Back to surf it seems
That won't do for any even remotely normal user and you know that!
You're saying that no remotely normal person would ever bother to download Fakespot free of charge if it wasn't pushed at them through obnoxious in-browser advertising? And how much did Mozilla pay for this thing?
No, I did not say that. As evident by, well, what I wrote there.
No? What was your justification for building big and intrusive ads for Fakespot into Firefox then, if not that nobody would otherwise bother to go looking for it?
My mom would love that feature, and she wouldnt go looking for it.
Also that popup only appears when you click a tiny "shopping tag" icon in the adress bar, and THAT icon only appears on supported websites
Ah well, that's not so bad as I feared (as an esr and librewolf user I won't be seeing it for a while) but not so good as it might be. A little notification icon that appears when there's an update to inform people of such things is traditional and makes more sense to me.
Showing it instead when you visit a particular site unfortunately reminds people likely to be unhappy about it that their web browser now contains features designed specifically for the benefit of a small list of supported web sites.
Is this for sure built-in and not some extension? I don't have it.
its in beta
I hope that Ladybirdy gets something good happening. I simply having a another browser in this space would give Mozilla a good sanity check for their direction and values. Otherwise they're just kind of fumbling around.
There's Verso now too, a Servo based browser.
Thanks.
Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.
I have large doubts on an AIs ability to reliably spot fakes.
AI: "This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it."
There are literal bots on Reddit with less complexity able to measure the likelihood of a story being reliable and truthful, with facts and fact checkers. They're not always right, they ARE useful though. Or were. Not sure about now, been over a year since I left.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of those AIs since the newfangled factcheck bot seems to just pull its data from a premade database, so no AI here on Lemmy
If by reliably you mean 99% certainty of one particular review, yeah I wouldn't believe it either. 95% confidence interval of what proportion of a given page's reviews are bots, now that's plausible. If a human can tell if a review was botted you can certainly train a model to do so as well.
but it does not work. This stuff never does.
What do you mean by "this stuff?" Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.
bayesian filtering, yes. Llm's? no