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”?
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
The real reason people want to revoke the second amendment is so Mozilla will stop constantly pointing guns at their own feet.
What are the right settings to disable that crap via
user.js? I assume this is done via hidden extension, like Pocket.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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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.
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).
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.
LibreWolf
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
Thanks.
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.
“strategic partnerships”
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality
Protect your privacy
Firefox is committed to empowering you with information about review reliability while respecting your privacy. We use Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) for Review Checker.
When Review Checker is turned on, we use information about the products you visit on Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart to analyze the reviews, but by using OHTTP we ensure Mozilla cannot link you or your device to the products you have viewed. OHTTP uses encryption and a third party intermediary server to offer a technical guarantee that this is the case: all Mozilla learns from this network request is that someone, somewhere, looked at a given product.
I dislike doublespeak
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:
By processing the data jointly across two independent parties, they ensure neither party holds the information required to reveal sensitive information about someone.
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:
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? 🤷
