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.
Why can’t they stop adding all this bullshit and just improve their browser?
Improving the browser doesn’t make money, I guess.
I can get Pocket even if I don’t use it, and Mozilla VPN is essentially Mullvad but still lines up with Mozilla’s principles. But Fakespot is a headscratcher.
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I am still waiting patiently for a lot of things before I switch back to Firefox. Like passkeys (apparently they’re coming soon), a better interface for android tablets, native tab groups and split screen tabs and sidebar apps like in Vivaldi and Edge without the need for add-ons.
There is just so much stuff that they need to do, and yet their approach seems to be just integrating functionality that would have been better as an optional addon.
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