this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Firefox's new FakeSpot integration: the privacy problems (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by LWD@lemm.ee to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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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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[โ€“] InfiniWheel@lemmy.one 17 points 2 years 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)