PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big “yes, try it” button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool
https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676
So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it’s T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It’s like mozilla saying directly “we don’t care about your privacy”.
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The real reason people want to revoke the second amendment is so Mozilla will stop constantly pointing guns at their own feet.
This is such a clever comment and I am upset about it
Why do you think it’s useless?
If someone wanted it, they could’ve installed the Firefox extension, but now for users who doesn’t want this, they have an intrusive feature that is just a bloat. Also, even if I wanted it, it’s fairly useless unless you live in western countries.
Can you opt out?
Okay, but why do you think it’s useless?
For the same reasons as the shitty AI for detecting AI produced essays.
Because not many people from somewhere like greece shop on walmart or best buy, and many people who use Firefox also are anti amazon
Hmm, that might be a bug - it looks like it was only meant to be available in the US. I’ve never seen it, at least.
It’s not a bug. I don’t think they saw it. They just need something to be angry about.
I’m starting to worry about Mozilla. Firefox is still the best browser, and I’ve used it for many years… but there are more and more anti-features popping up that require a few settings to be changed. No one thing is a big deal, but I’m starting to feel the same way about Firefox as I did about Windows before I stopped using it: like it’s just trying to trick me into doing something I don’t want to do rather than aiming to be a good product.
I’m thinking specifically about the address bar getting ‘search suggestions’ from Google by default; and the special ‘ad effectiveness tracking’ that is turned on by default to help Facebook. Privacy should always be the default setting. We shouldn’t have to keep up-to-date with the latest features and settings just so that we know what to disable!
Firefox is gone for me. Too long with minor issues hanging around while they focus on the issues above.
Let me browse, bookmark, and thats pretty much it. Allowing me to save passwords okay fine but all that other stuff just no way
I’ve used Firefox since it was released. I will be considering other browsers due to this. I do not want AI in my products.
I don’t think AI is what’s wrong here…
Different priorities for different people. The AI is what I really have an issue with right now. I’m sick of it being shoved down everyone’s throats, and I have big ethical concerns about it in general.
Librewolf and Floorp are good Firefox based alternative browsers.
Floorp
Thanks, these look interesting. I’ve been using Firefox forever for my personal browsing (but Edge for work) and I’d prefer to stay with it if I can.
What other browsers? Firefox was the last good one.
Since Firefox is free and open source, there are many other variations of it built and distributed by the community.
I hope that Ladybirdy gets something good happening. I simply having a another browser in this space would give Mozilla a good sanity check for their direction and values. Otherwise they’re just kind of fumbling around.
There’s Verso now too, a Servo based browser.
I actually use fakespot a lot, but will never install an add-on for this.
I got that notice a few months ago, but I didn’t use either button on the bottom. I used the X on the top, and haven’t seen it since.
<rant>I thought we were done with the age of Toolbars, but here we are, back there. An app or add-on for every damn thing. No, I don’t want this integrated into my browser. No, I don’t need your HTML5 app on my phone to do less than the webpage does. No, I don’t want your spyware app to view the one-off Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram link a friend sends me. No, I don’t mean ‘maybe later’, I mean ‘no forever’.</rant>
but here we are, back there.
The upside is that if you’re ever prompted to install a thing to your browser to use a site’s features, it’s because the built-in sandbox is too restrictive for what they want. It’s an immediate red flag.
I also view prompts to “use our (phone) app” the same way. I’m already seeing your site, in my browser, with ten different kinds of adblock and tampermonkey scripts running. I already have what I want, and I’m not letting you anywhere near my data plan.
Clearly, it’s time for a “no means no” extension.
But the thing is, most people don’t think twice about it, and just go, “meh, why not, what’s the harm?” and install it, which tells those scummy summersons that “we” want this, and they keep pushing it, and making their site more and more useless without it, to the point, where ‘desktop view’ no longer works (I’m looking at you, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, to name a few).
Its getting to the point where its affecting services I use in the real world like ordering food. Having to explain why I’m not using an app and being upset the website doesnt work will definitely have customer service people who dont understand the implications of the system theyre promoting rolling their eyes at me for making their lives harder
I never explain exactly why. I skirt. “my phone isn’t compatible with your app”, “I don’t have a modern smartphone that works with your app”, “I don’t install apps on my phone”, “I don’t have space on my phone for your app”, “I only a work phone, and I’m not allowed to install anything”, and so on. They don’t care about your privacy, so don’t give it as a reason. “it’s not about privacy, I’m just poor”.
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Internet or other electronic network activity (e.g., browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual’s interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)
Category of Third Parties to Whom Personal Information is Sold and/or Shared: Advertising partners, Service providers
Just a snippet of the privacy policy. There’s other bad stuff too like location tracking. It’s also all ran through Google analytics.
So much for a privacy respecting Mozilla
And people thought Mozilla became an ad company when they bought the other ad company. Nope. I’m tracing it back to right here.
FakeSpot is a hilarious company run by trend chasers, “crypto enthusiasts and web3 believers.”
If Mozilla chasing the AI trend isn’t bad enough, and their privacy policy doesn’t hurt your soul, FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).
that also happen to be by far the most popular, and also where you are the mos likely to see fake reviews
“If the privacy invasion and corporate trend chasing doesn’t hurt your soul”?
Did you miss the privacy invasion where Mozilla now sells private data to advertising companies directly?
all the data that goes through the firefox integration is anonymised
anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It’s very easy to accidentally leak useful information
We are talking about Mozilla FakeSpot, not Mozilla PPA…
I know, there’s so many privacy issues right now that it’s hard to keep track.
i am talking about fakespot
The letters “anon” don’t appear anywhere in the privacy policy.
So where are you pulling this claim from, because it doesn’t smell right…
Mozilla claims the service respects your privacy because they are using OHTTP (which does NOT provide anonymity)… The marketing speak implies anonymity heavily, but doesn’t say it
they seem to be basically saying that they make most of their profit by selling your private data to advertisers, trend calculators etc etc
I puked a little when I read both names in the screenshot OP posted.
I’m not opposed to the tool itself but they can fuck off with pushing it onto us. If I want to see the newest Firefox features I’ll go the main site and find them.
That won’t do for any even remotely normal user and you know that!
You’re saying that no remotely normal person would ever bother to download Fakespot free of charge if it wasn’t pushed at them through obnoxious in-browser advertising? And how much did Mozilla pay for this thing?
No, I did not say that. As evident by, well, what I wrote there.
No? What was your justification for building big and intrusive ads for Fakespot into Firefox then, if not that nobody would otherwise bother to go looking for it?
My mom would love that feature, and she wouldnt go looking for it.
Also that popup only appears when you click a tiny “shopping tag” icon in the adress bar, and THAT icon only appears on supported websites
Ah well, that’s not so bad as I feared (as an esr and librewolf user I won’t be seeing it for a while) but not so good as it might be. A little notification icon that appears when there’s an update to inform people of such things is traditional and makes more sense to me.
Showing it instead when you visit a particular site unfortunately reminds people likely to be unhappy about it that their web browser now contains features designed specifically for the benefit of a small list of supported web sites.
Oh they’re finally integrating fake spot? That’s awesome, actually! Pretty cool plugin, that!
and its behind OHTTPS so your usage of it is completely anonymized
anonymized data can be re-identified
Sure, Mozilla customer representative #37.
Must be an easy world where anyone disagreeing with you has to always be a shill. Gets you around annoying concepts such as arguments, discussions or opinions.
Nah my good shill. I’ve had very interesting discussions about contrarian points in the past, and they’ve been enlightening. This one is… I mean, if you’re really not a shill, then be aware that baking that feature into a web browser is selfishly unnecessary.
I actually love Fakespot. I’ve had it installed as an extension for years, but now it’s native
And that’s the bullshit part. It shouldn’t be native. A browser should be a browser.
Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.
but it does not work. This stuff never does.
What do you mean by “this stuff?” Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.
I have large doubts on an AIs ability to reliably spot fakes.
There are literal bots on Reddit with less complexity able to measure the likelihood of a story being reliable and truthful, with facts and fact checkers. They’re not always right, they ARE useful though. Or were. Not sure about now, been over a year since I left.
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of those AIs since the newfangled factcheck bot seems to just pull its data from a premade database, so no AI here on Lemmy
AI: “This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it.”
Thanks.
I was happy when they used an entirely on-device AI to generate alt text for photos, but this is just ridiculous. They quite literally already have an extension that does the exact same thing this new “feature” offers.
Firefox was supposed to be a less bloated than chrome, but all they’ve done now is continued to add more and more to the browser that nobody actually asked for.
Give me bug fixes, UX and performance improvements, not entire sidebar popups for review checking that only works on 3 stores on the entire internet.
For the new AI review feature, we are the product not the customers.
