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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
183 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

Maybe. The latter part of the sentence matters, too

…you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

Good luck getting a lawyer to give a definitive answer to what exactly counts as helping you do those things.

The whole sentence is a little ambiguous itself. Does the "as you indicate with your use of Firefox" refer to

  • A) the whole sentence (i.e. "[You using Firefox indicates that] when you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content.") or
  • B) only to the last part of it (i.e. "When you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content [in the ways that you] indicate with your use of Firefox.")

B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably "if you send data to a website using our browser, don't sue us for sending the data you asked us to send". The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not — in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion — indicate that Mozilla could help me navigate, experience, or interact with online content by MITMing the uploaded or input data.

A is a lot scarier, since the interpretation of what it means to "help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content" does not depend on how you use Firefox. Anything that Mozilla can successfully argue to help you do those things is fair game, whether you ask for it or not, which seems a lot more abusable.

Opera Mini was (is?) an embedded/mobile browser for Symbian dumbphones and other similar devices that passed all traffic through a proxy to handle rendering on server side and reduce processing effort on the (typically slow and limited) mobile devices. This could be construed as helping the user navigate, experience, and interact with online content, so there is precedent of a browser MITMing its users' data for arguably helpful purposes.

I would never accept hijacking my web upload and input data for training an LLM or whatever mass data harvesting fad du jour happens to be in fashion at a given time and I do not consider it helpful for any purpose for a web browser to do such things. Alas, the 800-pound gorilla might have some expensive reality-bending lawyers on its side.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

The update on their news post supports the "don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send" intention.

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

Whether or not to believe them is up to you.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

Text removed in Mozilla TOS update:

       {
           "@type": "Question",
           "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?",
           "acceptedAnswer": {
               "@type": "Answer",
               "text": "Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. "
           }
       },

here's the diff

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

digging around in the the issue linked to that, it seems like the person who closed/approved this is someone from a different, external agency who lists moz as a client (her hachy profile also lists that as her employer)

this pr was closed "because we have new copy"

there's probably some questions to be asked around how this decision/instruction got made, but one would have to wade into moz's corp and discussion systems to do so (and apparently they also have a (people mostly communicating on) Slack problem - nfi if that's open to community joining)

none of them look good tho tbh

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn't want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of "not selling your personal data". Looking forward to April when that's finally deprecated.

+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

I think it's a nonsense nothingburger "clarification", esp. given the defaults firefox sets a priori on a fresh profile. even with the "no, don't turn $x on" choices for things that it does offer those for, there's still some egregious defaults being turned on

the cynic in me says it's intentionally vague because they're trying to, in advance, lay the legal groundwork for whatever the fuck they push on by default. my motivation for that thought is because of seeing the exact playbook being used by other services in the past, and it tracks with the way they've been pushing other features lately

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

Yep, the clarification doesn't really clarify anything. If they're unable to write their terms of service in a way that a layperson in legal matters can understand the intended meaning, that's a problem. And it's impossible for me to know whether their "clarification" is true or not. Sorry, Mozilla, you've made too many bad decisions already in the recent years, I don't simply trust your word anymore. And, why didn't they clarify it in the terms of service text itself?

That they published the ToS like that and nobody vetoed it internally, that's a big problem too. I mean, did they expect people to not be shocked by what it says? Or did they expect nobody would read it?

Anyway, switching to LibreWolf on all machines now.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesn't really matter, you get is abuse either way.

How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.

this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
24 points (100.0% liked)

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