Both sides, as in, the fair, balanced, and upbringing right view, and the evil menace to society that’s the destroying left sickos.

You know, being neutral and all that.

They started it by pretending to want to connect with artists.

Anyone that used them for even a limited amount of time will tell you that the thing can give you a correct, detailed explanation on how to do a thing, and provide a broken result. And vice versa. Looking into it by asking more have zero chance of being useful.

I don’t know how people can be so easily taken in by a system that has been proven to be wrong about so many things

Ahem. Weren’t there an election recently, in some big country, with uncanny similitude with that?

some good stuff

If you want to live in medieval time with your wife/servant, sure.

Let’s hope they won’t cheap out on those bolts. Thankfully cheaping out on everything is not an habit they have, right?

No idea, I’m not that obsessed with it. But do note that “The developers of these apps provided info about their data sharing practices to an app store. They may update it over time.” and “Data sharing practices may vary based on your app version, use, region, and age.”

The recent changes to Firefox terms of use (well, their introduction really) was supposedly meant to appease some regional lawmakers. Maybe it is a regional thing. Maybe they changed it again. Maybe it’s, as often with store page update, rolled out progressively to people (in either direction, whether it’s adding or removing these terms).

The point is, that’s neither a “Google” operation to put Firefox in a bad light, nor a Mozilla operation to… do whatever it is they’re doing these days. It’s just a regular message. Which, reading a lot of the replies here, is something that have to be said.

That’s a regular notification, which would happen for any application whose data policy is changed on the Play Store page. These policy are as declared by the app publisher. This would be the same for any application that didn’t check that “sharing data with third party” box earlier, then checked it later on.

There’s no need to reduce Firefox marketshare. Most people don’t even consider using anything else than whatever is default in their device.

Also, it’s not a Google scare tactic or a flex. Every application on the Play Store must disclose the general outlines of their data policy, including the sharing of data. Lying with those checkbox is not a good idea but they are completely informative and put there by the publishing party, so the people responsible for publishing Firefox on mobile just updated these, and this is what is shown when an app publisher say their app is sharing data with third parties.

tl;dr: it’s very likely that not a single soul at Google even looked at this, as this is just the regular behavior of the Play Store with apps that changes their data policy or indicate sharing user data with third parties.

how are they supposed to “sell your data”

First step is collecting it. Putting provisions to grab everything from the software you installed on your device and use to do everything is a good start. Second step is selling it. Data broker loves data, surprisingly. And even small, inconsequential stuff can go a long way when you can correlate with dozens, or hundreds, of data points.

if you just never use a Mozilla account

Given how it’s implemented, the data pushed inside your account may be in a safer place than what you use the browser to do daily at this point.

and uncheck all the telemetry

Funny thing. Even with everything unchecked/disabled/toggled off/whatever, there’s a handful of ping back and other small reports that are configured to go out. You can turn these off using the complete config page; the one that warns people that its dangerous and have no clear way to know what most of its options do.

Its not like they can secretly steal your data, since its Open Source

If by “secretly” you mean without us knowing, it would be hard indeed, as long as people did look into the source AND the built images were faithful to the source, too. They are not doing it secretly, at least for now, anyway. That’s the point of their “privacy notice” that includes basically everything, which they then use as a safeguard saying "we can’t do shit (unless specified in the privacy notice).

It seems to me like just more FUD that Google is spreading to undermine our trust in free software

The policy changes comes from Mozilla. Were written, published, and updated by Mozilla, on their blog (and legal pages). What the fuck are you talking about with Google?

Heck, if you knew 2cts about this, Google actually low-key needs Firefox to exists as a counterpoint to Chrome’s hegemony, unless they want another trial for being too good at their job.

Don’t collect anything on your own and don’t sell the things you don’t collect. Bam, problem solved.

I agree. I’d even be willing to regularly donate to a foundation that would have this aim as their goal and have their acts matching their promises.

Although, not necessarily a new engine. Going from scratch is a good way to remake a lot of mistakes, while reusing old code is a good way to keep old debt. That’s not a decision I would like to have to take.

It’s slowly turning, too. Start looking for something else.

The only acceptable privacy policy for a browser is “we won’t fucking look into anything, take anything, nor send anything anywhere you didn’t actually wish to send explicitly”.

Firefox have an extension system. If mozilla wants to bloat it, they should do it via extension, so that they’re not bloating the actually useful part. As it is, all they’re doing is forcing more work on people to manage forks to remove all the shit every time they push a release.

It sounds like you’re proud of your culture of not giving a crap about rules set to improve safety for everyone. On that account, I agree that we’ll never see eye to eye about this.

You’re not expected to break them. For your example, you’re not supposed to go over the speed limit. And it is, in fact, extremely easy to do so. Most people are fine with it. And, no, it’s not impossible to do so. There is nothing forcing you to go faster for little to no gain and increased risk for you and other.

You expecting to go over tells something about you.

The thing is, some people like proton. Or liked, if this keeps going. When you build a business on trust and you start flailing like a headless chicken, people gets wary.

At this point, beyond enduring, I’m afraid there is no “non violent” options. And to be clear, I don’t think non-violent options are going to improve anything, just that there’s not much else to do.

If someone doesn’t care about themselves, why would they care about other or littering.

Imagine if we already had all the tools needed, and all that’s missing is a bit of hosting and a bit of moderation. If only there was a company with some extra cash behind this… haha.

But it’s seriously time people retake some kind of control over their online activity. All these “services” looking at every occasion to screw their user is getting annoying.