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.
What’s Fakespot? A review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox."
Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
“We sell and share your personal information”
Fakespot’s privacy policy allows them to collect and sell:
- Your email address
- Your IP address
- Account IDs
- A list of things you purchased and considered purchasing
- Your precise location (which will be sent to advertising partners)
- Data about you publicly available on the web
- Your curated profile (which will also be sent to advertising providers)
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.)
Who asked for this? Who demanded integration into Firefox, since it was already a (relatively unpopular) browser extension people could have used instead?
Easier said than done, it’d take a large engineering team and a decade just to catch up with existing implementations. And in doing so you’ll probably stumble through all the same issues Mozilla has and end up as a large morally compromised nonprofit on the other end.
Or a glorified clone of Lynx.
Which, frankly, I would prefer. Gemini is nice, although it’s not even the web.