Mozilla adds stupid AI stuff with horrible T&C

astro_ray@lemdro.id to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 523 points –

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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I hate the anti-pattern of "Not Now". How about "No"?

Yeah, corporate dark patterns really don't respect consent. When would you like to know more: Now, or Later?

Though I don't mind the "accept, deny, ask me again later" for when something seems interesting but I don't want to put the effort into looking into it right at the moment but don't want to click yes without looking into it.

Best I can do is accepting three options: "Yes," "No," and "Remind me later."

"Not now" or "No, I don't want this awesome feature" bullshit infuriates me.

These should be flatly illegal. No means no

We had a whole generation of people that were taught that 'no' means 'maybe later' (the whole point of the 'no means no' ads about daterapes), and that same generation is now running these companies. What did we expect to happen?

Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
Oh right, you enshittified yourself.

Edit to add: Why give them money when they apparently already have too much of it from corporate inputs (most of it from Google)? I think they ask us for donations in order to retain their non-profit image, for PR purposes.

You are not wrong. I got curious how much they receive in donations, but could not find anything about it in their financial statements.

Fakespot is from Mozilla, if you trust Mozilla, why don't you trust Fakespot?

And why is it useless? With the amount of fake AI reviews an AI to detect them is not completely useless.

But the popup is annoying.

People shouldn't trust Mozilla either. It's a company that does company things. Just because it's not as far-gone as Google doesn't mean it's incapable.

I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.

just because its not as far-gone as Google

The fact that the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, despite wherever controversy there may be around their decisions of late, is a pretty significant factor.

Mozilla Foundation has no members, it's operated by the for-profit Corporation, and the Corporation is powered by its profit motive.

Even worse, the majority of its revenue comes from Google for making it the default search engine.

Using AI to detect AI is completely useless. It's been a big issue in academics, where a professor will plug your essay into an AI detector and then you get dinged for plagiarism because your entirely handwritten essay gets marked as AI. It's just glorified pattern matching, it has no concept of real or fake.

If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

I trust Mozilla to do what they promise with my private data

And why is it useless?

It's not useless. It's just that it's bloatware that's unnecessary for many.

Like a car with a bright orange "Order Bird Food" button in the middle of the dashboard. If you don't own any birds, then it sucks.

Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.

Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.

Sadly this type of bloat sells as "features" to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I'm not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.

Sure, sure, other browsers do it. But I expected more of Mozilla.

Pocket was already bad enough, but it was kiiiiinda related to browsing anyway - it was a glorified bookmarking tool. It had a nice purpose too - save pages for online reading - but they seem to have gotten rid of that and I'm mad about it.

didn't the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this

At this point, I'm glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don't miss Firefox one bit.

Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I'm still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?

Lots of love for librewolf here.

Strong fingerprint resistance breaks a lot of sites so just get used to disabling that on whatever sites.

On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.

Isn't Mull basicslly Firefox since it's just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don't notice any other differences on my phone

Yes, it's Firefox without the bullshit.

It's ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.

When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built "Phoenix," much, much later becoming Firefox.

Isn't Mull basicslly Firefox since it's just a Firefox-based fork?

I don't understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.

It's not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it's just a slight change in design and a different icon

Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don't look at my company's Jira, TYVM! πŸ˜‘ ) is cleared.

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?

they seem to be basically saying that they make most of their profit by selling your private data to advertisers, trend calculators etc etc

all the data that goes through the firefox integration is anonymised

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

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality

That's not the privacy policy.

The FakeSpot privacy policy is right here. No mention of anonymization when they sell data to ad brokers.

Regarding OHTTP: It's a CDN proxy with a pinkie promise. I trust their partnership with Firefox as much as I trust them with Google: not much.

With OHTTP, [Google] Safe Browsing does not see your IP address, and your Safe Browsing checks are mixed amongst those sent by other Chrome users,” Google affirms

In OP's screenshot, you are only going to agree to Mozilla's privacy policy and FakeSpot's TOS. So the FakeSpot's privacy policy is not involved.

And if you had actually read the FakeSpot TOS:

Your contract with us includes these Terms of Use, along with any rules and policies posted on our website from time-to-time and our Fakespot Privacy Notice located at https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-notice

You are right. I think they should make it more clear.

In the FakeSpot privacy notice, Google Analytics, Social Media Platforms, Contact Info, and Identifiers are not collected by Firefox, among others. So it's fair to say the data collected is not linked to the user.

The browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.enabled flag is intriguing. So I took a look. It turns out that the recommendation is only based on the current page you request the review analysis.

In general, I believe that it is primarily ambiguous legal documents rather than a genuine invasion of privacy.

I am aware its not the privacy policy, i have read through the privacy policy, however the fact that the info get proxied through and anonymised on fastly's servers counts for something

anonymization is not a silver bullet. Data gets deanonymized all the time. It's very easy to accidentally leak useful information

AI shit alone, I never understood the urge to build a whole OS in the browser. I want my browser to view websites. If I want more, then I can install extensions. I'd rather them release this as some sort of "official" extension. Might switch to LibreWolf (do you have any other suggestions?)

Libre wolf for privacy w/ customization, Mullvad for anonymity & blending into the crowd

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.

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'.

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".

"strategic partnerships"

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/review-checker-review-quality

Protect your privacy

Firefox is committed to empowering you with information about review reliability while respecting your privacy. We use Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) for Review Checker.

When Review Checker is turned on, we use information about the products you visit on Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart to analyze the reviews, but by using OHTTP we ensure Mozilla cannot link you or your device to the products you have viewed. OHTTP uses encryption and a third party intermediary server to offer a technical guarantee that this is the case: all Mozilla learns from this network request is that someone, somewhere, looked at a given product.

Here is a talk on OHTTP (OHAI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HEzpnktAwY

and a OHTTP recap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjLwo4Ufp8s

Basically, if you trust the OHTTP Proxy (mozilla) and the OHTTP service provider (fakespot) to not collude, then OHTTP protects your data.

If you think Mozilla and fakespot might collude, then this doesn't give you any privacy. (Update - Someone pointed out Mozilla has purchased fakespot, so this comes down to Trusting mozilla with 100% of your data for their privacy promise and OHTTP is totally pointless here)

Depends on your threat model.

If they actually cared about privacy they would have the OHTTP model, sure, but also a TOR hidden service endpoint that anyone could use as well ; Removing all the links between the user and the service shouldn't be a problem, since they are not monitizing user behavior, right? RIGHT?!?!?

Mozilla says they use a third-party OHTTP intermediary. In the blog post linked above, they name Fastly as their partner. So it's not as bad as Mozilla + Mozilla-wearing-funny-glasses.

Personally, I still think this is the wrong approach to privacy, even though I've used Fakespot on my own many times over the years. Largely because I don't think any of this needs to be built into a web browser.

I would prefer my web browser to minimize information leakage by default, to the greatest degree that it can while still remaining useful as a web browser. Mozilla keeps adding bloat to Firefox, and bloat always comes at a cost. I'd much prefer these to be browser extensions that people can download if they want them, rather than built in by default. The baseline Firefox should be lean. Less "stuff" = smaller attack surface. Simplicity is best.

I mean, the Fakespot browser extension has existed for a long time, and I've never seriously considered installing it. I'd much rather just take an extra three seconds to load their web site and paste in a URL than have it constantly monitoring my activity and doing god-knows-what with it. That way I have better knowledge and control of what is happening with my data. Even if I trust their intentions, I don't implicitly trust their competence (all software has bugs) and I don't trust that they will never go rogue in the future.

And also, I just don't find this claim all that compelling in principle:

By processing the data jointly across two independent parties, they ensure neither party holds the information required to reveal sensitive information about someone.

I mean...sure. That's fair. Buuuuuut handing half the data to your "partner" doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence. Especially since literally nobody reads all of the privacy policies they are subject to. See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/04/19/150905465/to-read-all-those-web-privacy-policies-just-take-a-month-off-work

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/you-need-a-whole-workweek-every-month-to-read-privacy-policiesand-thats-bad-news

Minimizing privacy policies should be a high-priority goal for any organization that claims to value privacy.

Furthermore, how many additional parties have access (legally or otherwise) to both Mozilla and Fastly? 🀷

I remember when Firefox was brand new over 20 years ago and one of the reasons for creating it was the main Mozilla browser had too much feature bloat so it was stripped down to just a browser and if you wanted more features you could add them in as extensions, putting just what you wanted in the browser and leaving out what you didn’t. It was great! Eventually Firefox became more popular so Mozilla switched their efforts to it and they’ve been jamming more things that used to be extensions in as features and bloating it full of features I don’t want. It’s one of the reasons I started using Chrome in the early days of Chrome but then of course that and Google started getting worse so I switched back to Firefox, but it still has its problems.

i would like to see mozilla making all of these features as full fledged browser extensions (installed by default, sure why not, but uninstallable at user request)

I don't trust Mozilla one single bit with my data as long as they have an advertising network enabled by default and use pingback telemetry for ALL actions you do in the browser by default that can only be turned off by changing multiple "hidden" about:config settings.

Wait, where does it say that Mozilla is the third-party intermediary server?

It doesn't, but when modeling threats we have to go be capabilities and not intentions.

If we're going by capabilities, then your browser maker can already see everything you do in that browser.

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

Please tell me there's an about:config setting to turn this bs off.

I got this linked on Mastodon: https://kitsunes.club/notes/9wbyqywt28

Nice. Thank you. For those who don't click the link, it appears you can disable by setting these flags:

browser.shopping.experience2023.active

and:

browser.shopping.experience2023.survey.enabled

To false.

EDIT: On finally getting back to my desktop and disabling these, it looks like there's a bunch of these browser.shopping.experience2023 flags. Some of them set to true, others false, I just set them all to false.

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.

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 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.

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.

i did not get a pop up on a amazon page maybe a us only thing idk but its ironic how firefox advertises Privacy related feature

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.

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?

apt remove firefox (or via pacman, windows settings etc)

Otherwise should be a bunch of flags you can set in about:config

I beluga there is an about:config setting to disable it. You can find more details somewhere in the comments of this post or the original post that I quoted.

Okay, but why do you think it's useless?

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.

For the same reasons as the shitty AI for detecting AI produced essays.

Oh they're finally integrating fake spot? That's awesome, actually! Pretty cool plugin, that!

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.

IANAL, but I don't think T&Cs are really legally binding and can be easily fought against in court.

While true, it requires time and money to get a case before the court. Which most people don't have. If your rights require you to invest your time and money against a much larger adversarial party in court, then it's not your rights that are being protected in the first place. Right now Big Tech is more worried about us exercising our rights instead of being afraid of trampling on them in the first place.

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.

I know ... But people actually literally want this.

Maybe FF is what we install for normies while we use forks for other flavours.

people actually literally want this

Who’s tearfully begging for a chatbot to tell them what a review page says instead of just clicking on the page and reading the actual reviews wtf

Normies.

Our IT department is constantly getting tickets to unblock random shitty stuff like that.

I cannot explain it, not even a little, I just know it's a thing.

Perhaps the general ad infestation of everything blurred the lines.

In a way, in the immediate sense of the moment, being sold bullshit by AI/algorithms or irl by a sales person isn't that much different. And people don't care about tomorrow or anything they can't immediately see.

(Im guessing, all of it)

Does fakespot have a chatbot? I thought it predated LLMs and is basically just some human-made algorithms to filter out suspicious reviews.

But people actually literally want this.

No-one except advertisers want this.

Most people simply do not care at all.

Why do advertisers want you to have tools that help you detect covert advertising?

Because Mozilla takes a metric shitload of your data via fakespot such as (but not limited to)

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)

https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

And then sells it to advertisers

How does "waiving your right to a lawsuit" hidden in a terms and conditions apply? I bet it doesn't

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

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.

Is this for sure built-in and not some extension? I don't have it.

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.

Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.

I have large doubts on an AIs ability to reliably spot fakes.

AI: "This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it."

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

If by reliably you mean 99% certainty of one particular review, yeah I wouldn't believe it either. 95% confidence interval of what proportion of a given page's reviews are bots, now that's plausible. If a human can tell if a review was botted you can certainly train a model to do so as well.

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.

Seems like you can press the not now button

Not a big deal...

I consider it a big deal. I'm clicking "Not Now" buttons all day when I just want to use a piece of software for its main purpose. And then because it says "Not Now" I get asked again and again and again.