@firefoxwebdevs @aaribaud It really isn’t a grey area!! I understand why you say it is, “well nothing happens until you engage with one of several new UI elements.” But that’s not how regular people think. The UI is full of booby traps and it feels so bad to have to fight against the browser! It’s supposed to be my user agent, not an adversary.

@flod (Part of my job is managing translations for a midsize libre project.) MT isn’t killing what’s left of the open web? The tech is the same, but it’s not being used to gobble up attention, truth, creativity, thinking itself. MT isn’t shoved down our throats. Also I’ve had volunteers show up and submit unreviewed MT output and that just wastes everyone’s time. But if you don’t work with volunteers, you won’t experience this particular harm.

@matthewboniface @MonaApp I’m providing feedback that I don’t appreciate the hard sell. I am also curious to hear what the developer has to say, and whether they will respond at all.

@matthewboniface @MonaApp Why temporary?

@ryanleesipes I read the linked post and all I can think, oh I see, let’s build an ethical open source bullshit slop machine. Many of the harms are inherent to the tech. What’s not inherent either doesn’t exist yet or raises the bar very high. I don’t understand how sinking money into AI for Mozilla isn’t playing their game.

@ryanleesipes Cars are a technology. Massively successful. And yet massively harmful. But electric cars are here and they are great, right? I wish for another world, one where we kept public transit and built more, where everything didn’t revolve around the car. Where crossing the street wasn’t a constant gamble. Do you see what I mean? Mozilla is choosing to (attempt to) build a less harmful car.

@MonaApp The “limited time offer” thing feels like a sleazy sales tactic. Makes me not want to support this anymore. What am I missing?

@ryanleesipes Related story: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/

“No it’s the children who are wrong”

@ryanleesipes I am a donor to Thunderbird and I would like to see search that works someday. I disagree that it’s a “nice to have” power user feature. Who do you think uses Thunderbird today? It’s a choice, not a default, right?

@ryanleesipes Also equating “AI” to the web is wild. AI is killing what is left of the web. There is no clean AI, only less dirty but then you’re playing their game that you can’t win.

@ryanleesipes I get why execs are excited about AI. It’s the safe move, do what everyone else is doing, but “trustworthy” and “open source”. Meanwhile, I see Firefox with its second class dev tools that the org clearly doesn’t prioritize fixing, like missing console search and network filtering settings. But I hear from the talk they need to empower developers. Ok.

@umps @gkcan “The privacy community”.

@iampytest1 I’ll take a look, thanks.

@iampytest1 @SpaceLifeForm If you are not sure, why spread FUD?

@mcc @emmy https://mastodon.social/@eff/112922761259324925

@mcc @emmy We’re keeping an eye on Mozilla’s PPA experiment. It’s not clear we need to do anything about it yet though. I hear and agree that it would be nice if we could keep ad tech out of our browsers entirely.

@WPalant Or maybe it’s https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/112832193043998029

@emmy @mcc Re Firefox’s built in protections, check out our FAQ:

https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with-Firefox%27s-built-in-content-blocking

@dexternemrod @andypiper @elphez @eff Yep, in short, PB still learns automatically, it’s just that the learning is remote only by default. Plus, PB is more than a block list:

https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with-other-extensions%2c-including-other-adblockers

@flaki Where is the researched reasoning for including surreptitious data collection for the benefit of advertisers in a user agent? It falls on Mozilla to justify this properly, and yet their explainer seems to have no examples beyond Meta making less money as a consequence of Apple’s privacy changes. That is not good enough!