1 hour ago, hazelnut said:
<div class="ipsQuote_contents">
<p>
Maybe so but Firefox had no right to sneak this in without asking user permission did they.
</p>
</div>
They certainly chose a poor approach for it, using the SHIELD studies feature; but I think the article is rather hyperbolic to the point of coming off as both immature and uninformed.
I happened to have been actively following the Looking Glass fiasco as it unfolded via /r/firefox. Savvy users quite quickly made the link to Mr. Robot by looking through the code for the addon (found on GitHub), and soon discovered that the addon was totally inert unless you modified an about:config:preference to make it function. Upon doing so, it would flip some words up-side down and prompt you to follow a link to an incomplete information page (incomplete presumably because the study was sent out prematurely). It did not otherwise collect or transmit any data.
As someone generally opposed to ads, I see and understand the resentment. However so far as I know, there was no profit motive here like the article suggests. Mozilla is a non-profit, and the bulk of their operating income comes from their search engine partnerships.
I do think some blame falls upon users for not being more attentive to the SHIELD preferences. Being opted-in to studies explicitly allows Mozilla to push, without warning, addons to your browser the modify your user experience. Whether or not one thinks those settings should be enabled by default is surely a topic for discussion, but somewhat besides the point given the reality that they seem to be. (they certainly are on by default for Nightly, but I do not know the default setting on a clean profile using only the Stable release channel, I imagine that it is "on" though.
Quote
<div class="ipsQuote_contents">
<p>
I have a profile that dates back to pre-1.0 releases, and I always carefully check and screen every single program setup and installation.
</p>
</div>
Clearly the author did not carefully check Firefox's about:preferences#privacy page (perhaps they overlooked the complete redesign of the preferences in Firefox 56 during their review of Firefox 57), or he would have seen that not only were those boxes ticked, but the studies one even helpfully links to about:studies which itself links to SHIELD study information
I think Mozilla had a poor response to user outrage initially, and they were essentially forced to make a second apology because of how lacking their initial response was.
At the end of the day, while Mozilla acted here in bad faith of their users, I don't think they did so in an <em>intentionally malicious manner</em> and the real-world impact of what they did was to scare a bunch of people who thought they may have had malware (that they didn't). I don't think this makes Mozilla " Yet another shark in the pond, after its share of filthy dimes."
I am not a reader of this website, and do not know if this manner of writing is typical of their articles, but it comes off (to me) as rather petulant.
So at the risk of sounding like a Mozilla apologist, I don't think the author is informed enough about Mozilla as an entity (particularly what they do outside the scope of developing Firefox) to make some of the claims he does.
Was Mozilla wrong to use the SHIELD study system to push out promotional content? Probably. That's not what the system is there for.
Did they have the "right to" push content without asking? You could argue that "yes because that's what being opted into studies means." or "no because studies seem to be on by default and shouldn't be." I don't think they should be on-by-default on the Release channel (if that's the case), but I think it's absolutely reasonable for them to be on by default in both Beta and Nightly given that the purpose of those channels is to test prereleases and new features of the browser.
Quote
<div class="ipsQuote_contents">
<p>
In a world without real choice, the best you can do, short of a proper bloody revolution, is to b**** and moan and tell your story.
</p>
</div>
It's not as if there aren't other browsers, but the author themselves after all that moaning even says they'll be sticking with Firefox because it's the least annoying.
So while I am both a fan of Mr. Robot and Mozilla & what they do, and I recognize the user-trust implications of what happened (at a time where they're struggling to regain market traction), I don't particularly care for this article itself.