Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could “try” a new service, Fakespot, on the app.
Fakespot is littered with privacy issues.
Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
“We sell and share your personal information”
Fakespot’s privacy policy allows them to store and/or sell:
- Your email address
- Your IP address
- “Protected chacteristics”
ie gender, sexuality, race… - Data scraped from across the web
- Account IDs
- Things you bought
(This is sold to advertisers) - Things you considered buying
(This is sold to advertisers) - Your precise location
(This is sold to advertisers) - Inferences about you
(This is sold to advertisers)
Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search “merge” in both.)
People donate to Mozilla because they believe in the company’s stated goals. Why were the donations put into an acquisition of a company with this kind of privacy policy? And why has Mozilla focused on bundling it as bloat into their browser? Now that Brave is in hot water for becoming bloated, Mozilla should buck the trend, not follow it.
I looked at fakespot after their LLM chat announcement and was sad that all of the install buttons were browser extensions. It seems like it mainly redirects the user to the site with the URL filled in. This would be trivial with a bookmarklet. Plus the bookmarklet isn’t slowing down your browser or stealing your private info when it isn’t being used.
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Right but that’s the feature and you’re the product