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.
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?
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.
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?)
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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.
Hot take
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.
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.
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.
until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.
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.
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
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.
<rant>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’.</rant>
but here we are, back there.
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).
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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.
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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:
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.
Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork?
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.
I was happy when they used an entirely on-device AI to generate alt text for photos, but this is just ridiculous. They quite literally already have an extension that does the exact same thing this new “feature” offers.
Firefox was supposed to be a less bloated than chrome, but all they’ve done now is continued to add more and more to the browser that nobody actually asked for.
Give me bug fixes, UX and performance improvements, not entire sidebar popups for review checking that only works on 3 stores on the entire internet.
For the new AI review feature, we are the product not the customers.
AFAIK this is the result of their acquisition of fakespot.com
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.
That is where I looked and could not find it, albeit only on my short commute from work.
LibreWolf
FakeSpot is a hilarious company run by trend chasers, “crypto enthusiasts and web3 believers.”
If Mozilla chasing the AI trend isn’t bad enough, and their privacy policy doesn’t hurt your soul, FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
that also happen to be by far the most popular, and also where you are the mos likely to see fake reviews
“If the privacy invasion and corporate trend chasing doesn’t hurt your soul”?
Did you miss the privacy invasion where Mozilla now sells private data to advertising companies directly?
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
anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It’s very easy to accidentally leak useful information
We are talking about Mozilla FakeSpot, not Mozilla PPA…
I know, there’s so many privacy issues right now that it’s hard to keep track.
i am talking about fakespot
The letters “anon” don’t appear anywhere in the privacy policy.
So where are you pulling this claim from, because it doesn’t smell right…
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
I puked a little when I read both names in the screenshot OP posted.
How does “waiving your right to a lawsuit” hidden in a terms and conditions apply? I bet it doesn’t
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
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.
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Internet or other electronic network activity (e.g., browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)
Category of Third Parties to Whom Personal Information is Sold and/or Shared: Advertising partners, Service providers
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
And people thought Mozilla became an ad company when they bought the other ad company. Nope. I’m tracing it back to right here.
