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Firefox's new FakeSpot integration: the privacy problems (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could "try" a new service, Fakespot, on the app.

Fakespot is littered with privacy issues.

Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
"We sell and share your personal information"

Fakespot's privacy policy allows them to store and/or sell:

Your email address
Your IP address
"Protected chacteristics"
ie gender, sexuality, race...
Data scraped from across the web
Account IDs
Things you bought
(This is sold to advertisers)
Things you considered buying
(This is sold to advertisers)
Your precise location
(This is sold to advertisers)
Inferences about you
(This is sold to advertisers)

Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search "merge" in both.)

People donate to Mozilla because they believe in the company's stated goals. Why were the donations put into an acquisition of a company with this kind of privacy policy? And why has Mozilla focused on bundling it as bloat into their browser? Now that Brave is in hot water for becoming bloated, Mozilla should buck the trend, not follow it.

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[–] InstallGentoo 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why can't they stop adding all this bullshit and just improve their browser?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Improving the browser doesn't make money, I guess.

I can get Pocket even if I don't use it, and Mozilla VPN is essentially Mullvad but still lines up with Mozilla's principles. But Fakespot is a headscratcher.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am still waiting patiently for a lot of things before I switch back to Firefox. Like passkeys (apparently they're coming soon), a better interface for android tablets, native tab groups and split screen tabs and sidebar apps like in Vivaldi and Edge without the need for add-ons.

There is just so much stuff that they need to do, and yet their approach seems to be just integrating functionality that would have been better as an optional addon.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agree with everythint but just one thing. None of the donations are going into this side of Mozilla, this is Google money mostly (and some Pocket money too probably). You can only donate to their foundation and their activism, but not to any of their software projects (except Thunderbird but no idea how that works IANAL)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I looked at fakespot after their LLM chat announcement and was sad that all of the install buttons were browser extensions. It seems like it mainly redirects the user to the site with the URL filled in. This would be trivial with a bookmarklet. Plus the bookmarklet isn't slowing down your browser or stealing your private info when it isn't being used.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Right but that's the feature and you're the product