Comment by dpwm
9 years ago
From the page:
> No changes will be made to Firefox unless you have opted in to this Alternate Reality Game.
Also, from the same page for those that appreciate irony:
> One of the 10 guiding principles of Mozilla's mission is that individuals' security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. The more people know about what information they are sharing online, the more they can protect their privacy.
> No changes will be made to Firefox unless you have opted in to this Alternate Reality Game.
That can't possibly be true. I had it installed, and I'm on my work machine using Firefox Developer Edition. I didn't opt in to any ARG.
I think what they mean is that the addon doesn't do anything unless you opt-in. Still, why install it at all?
The installation of the add-on is unquestionably a change to Firefox. Whether the add-on does anything is largely immaterial.
Really poor choice of words here from mozilla. "The changes that already happened will not make changes to your firefox unless you enable them to", in other words the changes already happened and are just waiting to be activated.
It's installed, but apparently doesn't do anything if you don't have "studies" enabled.
Something was installed on my system without my permission, from a vendor that I chose specifically because they promise not to do things like that.
To put it another way - if I discovered a rootkit sitting in the ~/Downloads directory on my Mac, that would be a problem. If the entity that surreptitiously placed it there said that I shouldn't worry about it because it hadn't been run, I wouldn't be inclined to trust them.
8 replies →
Installing extensions is not "No changes will be made to Firefox".
> No changes will be made to Firefox unless you have opted in to this Alternate Reality Game.
How does it not occur to them that this is a clear lie?
Because the previous ads for Pocket and Telefonica were effective and they don't care?
I hardly think it's a lie. My browser contains no trace of anything related to Looking Glass, even though I'm opted into Shield Studies. It seems to affect some people but not others. Definitely something that should be fixed in the core mechanism of how these things are downloaded by your browser if there are cases where it can happen without user intervention, but it doesn't seem to be intentional to download extensions without the user's consent.
It's absolutely a lie.
Mozilla has injected malicious-looking advertisement executable software into my process without my permission and then lied about it. I have no idea what this software is, what it does, or whether it is proprietary or free. I opted into nothing.
This is a huge, huge mistake by Mozilla.