loading . . . I usually post here first and my post get shared to tumblr, but for this I posted on tumblr first, so I'm manually sharing it here too:
I want to talk a bit, again, about Mozilla and the changes that are happening around firefox ToS and commercial model.
So, I won't go again about why I don't trust the changes they are doing and why. I wanna go into something deeper, and worse, I've found out during my conversation with @[email protected].
So, long story short, when Mozilla announced they were acquiring a "privacy" startup called Anonym several months ago, I didn't think much about it. Tech companies acquire startups all the time when they want to do something this or that early stage startup does already. They buy the company, sometimes even for token amounts, and the entire startup joins them as their new "division of Whatever". So, as I said, when Moz announced their acquisition of Anonym, I barely paid attention: sure, sure, mozilla just acqui-hired a bunch of privacy-focused engineers, great.
But ... this morning I started looking in deep, and holly shit. Before I even started looking into the Anonym, I just saw who founded it:
Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood. Two ex-facebook executives, who had been top heads on facebook's advertising and marketing divisions. These are the people who founded Anonym and now work for Mozilla. WHAT. THE. FUCK. These are people who has lead the worst division of Facebook in the worst years of the company. The years that made Zuck to entirely change the name, because "facebook" was considered too toxic. These are the guys who spearheaded converting the entire internet in a surveillance capitalism subproduct. These are THE BAD GUYS of the internet. If enshittification had a face, it would be those two guys up there.
So! Maybe they regret being an absolutely waste of human beings deserving to go to hell a thosand times over and now they want to redeem themselves?? ok let's look at what anonym do.
Mozilla let our guy Brad to write a blog post about this, nice! I can't totally trust his words, but hey, there has to be some kernel of truth in what they are trying to sell, right? so let's check! here's the post:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overview/
Holly fuck. HOLLY, FUCKING, FUCK.
Let me copy paste an excerpt:
> "First, it’s important for us to be clear about the specific problem we’re trying to address. Digital advertising is highly reliant on user level data sharing between various industry participants. A simple example: Ad platforms collect information about the browsing and buying behavior of individuals from millions of websites and apps. That information is often associated with a user’s “profile” and then is used to determine which ads to show that user. This practice is referred to by a number of terms – tracking, profiling, cross-site sharing, etc. Whatever the term, this approach typically isn’t aligned with people’s reasonable expectation of privacy. And it’s actually not even necessary to drive ad performance. Anonym’s goal is to develop a better approach for the industry."
ok, not bad start, yeah, we all want more privacy, for sure. But then THIS happens:
excuse me, WHAT? so your approach to "better privacy" is:
We shouldn't leak the private data we have from you
The data we mine from you should be anonymized and not linked your personal information when we sell it
We have to be transparent with advertisers so they trust us
We have to be able to met any demand from advertisers
WHAT THE FUCK?
So, 1 & 2 ARE FUCKING LEGAL REQUIREMENTS, at least in the EU (and I think in some states of the US, too). And 3&4 have NOTHING to do with user privacy, but with them being trustable for the people who pays for the ads.
This is FUCKING FACEBOOK. They have created an startup so anyone can use the facebook model for advertisement (data mining, anonymized data selling, scalable to the infinite). They left the monster they build to create a smaller version of that monster that anyone could use for their own company. And then, Mozilla bought them and put them, and their mini facebook, as their new advertisement division.
What the fuck. What THE FUCK.
This is WAY WORSE than what the terms of service changes seemed to point to. They have put the fucking wolves in charge of the sheep.
This is fucking disgusting. Those bastards never, ever, should have got their dirty greedy little hands close to a project like firefox. https://goblin.band/notes/a55nxem9jukg6cw8
