firefox develops an optional predictive search feature like every other search engine and browser has that actually protects user privacy that can easily be turned off so naturally the internet loses their mind over it and declares firefox dead.
I'm on the "OK but keep an eye on it" train, here.
Devs need feedback to know how people are using the product, and opt-out tracking is the best way to do it. In this case, it seems like my personal data is completely unidentifiable.
I was coding in the IE6 era, so I'd really prefer to not end up in a browser engine monoculture again.
There are definitely 2 kinds of people commenting this post. The first one who supports telemetry (and Big Tech) and another one that supports freedom and opt-in. This is interesting to see on something like Lemmy. I think the ones who support telemetry are devs and it is a little bit concerning to me
This isn't even telemetry, it's data collection for AI. That they refused to say that let's you know that they think what they're doing needs to be obfuscated.
In life, people will frequently say things to you that won't be the whole truth, but you can figure out what's actually going on by looking at the context of the situation. This is commonly referred to as "being deceptive" or sometimes just "lying". Corporate PR and salespeople, the ones who put out this press release, do it regularly.
You don't need to record content categories of searches to make a good tool for displaying websites, you need it to perform predictions about what users will search for. They've already said they wanted to focus on AI and linked to an example of the system they want to improve, it's their site recommender, complete with sponsored recommendations that could be sold for a higher price if the Mozilla AI could predict that "people in country X will soon be looking for vacations".
This looks fine, the browser just puts your search into a category like "health" or "tech", then sends the amount of each category completely anonymously.
Also, if you've opted out of data collection already that setting applies to this too.
Importantly, if you have already opted out of sending data to Mozilla, this change will not affect you. It only sends data if you have the setting turned on. It takes just a few clicks to entirely disable it, and Mozilla deletes all record of your browser within 30 days from turning off this feature. If you're worried about it, do it now, it's just under Settings > Privacy & Security. Instructions are also linked in the blog post.
I'm not a fan of the telemetry being enabled by default but having the option to completely disable it makes it not that bad. Though Mozilla definitely doesn't need search history data (unless the law enforcements told them to collect it) so this change is kinda sus
Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned subsidiary that is Mozilla Corporation that is for-profit.
For instance the revenue from Google, so they’re the default search engine, is seen by Mozilla Corporation. So things search-related will indeed be part of their for-profit arm.
It’s not a loophole. As a subsidiary, profits are still invested into the nonprofit and they’re still guided by the Mozilla manifesto. It just lets them do more and raise more funds which would be difficult to do with nonprofit status (selling default search engine for instance). Here’s their original press release when they incorporated Mozilla Corporation in 2005.
