Comment by kryptiskt
9 years ago
So this is the first response from Mozilla in the Gizmodo article:
“Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. It’s especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said in a statement to Gizmodo. “The experience was kept under wraps to be introduced at the conclusion of the season of Mr. Robot. We gave Mr. Robot fans a unique mystery to solve to deepen their connection and engagement with the show and is only available in Firefox.”
This is horrible. They pushed out this crap under false pretenses as a study and obfuscated it. Don't talk the ethics talk if you're not prepared to do the ethics walk.
I've been using Firefox for 90% of my browsing for a few years now and really want to continue to do so but I really wish Mozilla would stop shooting themselves in the foot already. This once again gives the impression that they have some teams that aren't in touch with the reality on the ground, that these types of initiatives hurt their chances of gaining more users.
Let me suggest you a browser aptly named waterfox, that could be described as firefox without mozilla nonsense.
[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
Waterfox is nonsense, no offense to the people behind it. Removing some stuff from Firefox and calling it a day does not make a better Firefox, it just makes for a preconfigured one. You might as well just run Chromium.
The problem is that Mozilla is a good company, that has had a true net positive effect on the world, especially in tech, and continues to do so today with wonderful projects like Rust etc.
If Mozilla were a shitty company, we could all simply dismiss Firefox and get on with our day. But Mozilla is not a shitty company and the fact they keep shooting themselves in the foot like GP said, the fact they are completely out of touch with their userbase, that they cannot see the OBVIOUS problems with this addon even after the Pocket debacle, is ridiculous.
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Is there any reason to believe that one guy has sufficient resources to maintain a fork of firefox? Its not like he can keep backporting all fixes from what will increasingly be an incompatible browser.
It also wont get any of the improvements mozilla is in the process of making so it will ultimately be slower and with fewer features.
> Don't talk the ethics talk if you're not prepared to do the ethics walk.
Exactly.
> "The experience does not collect or share any data," Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said
Looking in the sources of the extension, it adds additional HTML header to every HTML request to https://www.red-wheelbarrow.com/forkids/ pages. The activity of the users there could of course be tracked and the data dependent on the extension being active collected. Good try Mr. marketing officer of Mozilla delivering Mr. Robot ad using the mechanism for the "studies."
> "Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users."
Obviously fail. Surprise, yes. Delight? No.
The add-on only initializes itself (and thus sends the header) if the user has manually gone into about:config and flipped the `extensions.pug.lookingglass` preference: https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/blob/59659431fd2a75c33...
It was obviously not complete in the form it was delivered, the "turning on" was supposed to be added somewhere at some later moment.
The whole thing is still suspicious: it was delivered to everybody whereas if it was supposed to be used only by the users who are aware of it, as now Mozilla tries to spin it, i.e. only to those who decided to "play the game", then the hidden install, especially to every user, was unnecessary as the normal extensions to Firefox are easily installed by the user, a click or two are enough:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-cat-fri...
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What are the odds that [current] Chief Marketing Officer Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is also the highest-ranking person in the organization to have signed off on this?
If they'd decided to sneak in a Mr Robot-themed easter egg I wouldn't really care. The fact that they decided to use a debugging/telemetry permission to push out a stupid marketing gimmick makes me question the judgement of everyone involved.
Much like some other situations in the political arena over the past 2-3 decades, I don't care that much about what was done but the decision to do it makes me question the judgement of people that I'm supposed to trust to make good decisions.
> [...] The experience does not collect or share any data [...]
Wrong (unless proven otherwise).
From the Shield Studies FAQ[1]:
> What data do Shield Studies normally collect?
> [...]
> Mechanism:
>> - at STARTUP, SHUTDOWN, INSTALL, UNINSTALL, - send a `shield-study` packet containing the Unified Telemetry Environment.
As was stated before, users report that they have had this extension pushed to their browser without their prior consent to sending any telemetry data.
[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies