Bonum Certa Men Certa

Facebook and Other Surveillance Capitalists Won't Save Mozilla From Google Dependence

Summary: Techrights looks deeper at (and under) the guts of the spying industry and the Surveillance Capitalists who drive it (or subsidise it); this is part of an ongoing series of investigative reports

Privacy abuses in so-called 'privacy' (or supposedly privacy-centric) services is truly out of control; it is rampant. Techrights is doing a long-term investigation into it, and it will occasionally release known and confirmed facts.



Consider the System1/Startpage scandal which we revisited some days ago. Things aren't as they seem (or marketed). "I've asked Mozilla at its subreddit if it has gotten an investment by System1," one person told us. We've actually heard from quite a few concerned people lately. It's no secret that Mozilla receives a lot of money from Google (search engine placement) and for a while it explored doing the same with Microsoft through Yahoo! -- a decision we strongly condemned at the time.

"How do people assume Mozilla is making money? It doesn't grow on trees and there are big salaries to be paid."Mozilla constantly talks about privacy; but it also endlessly uses words like "telemetry" -- a euphemism for spying that Microsoft too loves to use. How do people assume Mozilla is making money? It doesn't grow on trees and there are big salaries to be paid. Watch some of these figures (especially top-level management, as we noted back in August):

Mozilla Foundation salaries
Click or zoom in if the fonts are too fine



So what's Mozilla's corporate/financial strategy (it's a corporation, not a charity)? Sometimes one just needs to check who's being put in charge, for example:

mozilla-facebook-shepard

mozilla-facebook-lin

At the moment we're still investigating who exactly pays Mozilla and what for. It's not just about Mozilla, either. The Foundation's IRS filings are completed with all the figures one needs to understand the Foundation, but not the Corporation. The latter isn't a public company and therefore this kind of stuff isn't in the public domain.

"But these sorts of suspicions are what happens when the business model of a company depends so heavily on Surveillance Capitalists."Mozilla is careful not to blast Google 'too much'; we know why. We know who pays Mozilla, but we don't know how much. The complaints about Chrome taking much of Firefox's market share typically come from former or departing Mozilla staff, not current workers. If Mozilla's strategy is moving away from Surveillance Capitalists, then excellent. Power to you, Mozilla. But if not, then you're just swapping masters and anything said about privacy would be mostly a decoy. Your biggest asset -- and you know it -- is the large number (albeit declining) number of users and their browsing habits.

"Companies love telling us that the sole risk to one's privacy is "advertisers"; they don't talk about nations and armies that leverage data ("intelligence") for manipulation and blackmail. That would kind of freak/creep out some people."Outsourcing DNS lookups to Cloudflare (from one's ISP, which is based in one's own nation) has led to an outcry and Mozilla publicly denying (to ZDNet; Asa D. told me that himself directly) that Cloudflare was paying for this. But these sorts of suspicions are what happens when the business model of a company depends so heavily on Surveillance Capitalists. As we shall show in future parts of this series, the Surveillance Capitalists can also be banks looking to benefit some military interests. Companies love telling us that the sole risk to one's privacy is "advertisers"; they don't talk about nations and armies that leverage data ("intelligence") for manipulation and blackmail. That would kind of freak/creep out some people.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
They're Very Jealous of Richard Stallman and His Freedom (or Simple Lifestyle)
Jealousy is toxic because it can cause rational people to act irrationally and even severely harm themselves
Akira Urushibata on GNU coreutils
new message
 
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
More Photos From This Week's Milan Talk by Richard Stallman
The posts are in Italian, not English
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Links 27/05/2025: Science Defunded, India Arrests an Academic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/05/2025: From Celsius to Fahrenheit and Deleting Social Control Media
Links for the day
Microsofters Have, in Effect, Attempted Extrajudicial Action Against Us
Courts and Judges (or Masters) don't exist to facilitate this kind of "bro" culture
UK High Court Masters Are Not Your Jesters, Microsoft
Judges aren't there for "funny" spectacles, they're there to act as arbiters in critical cases, not SLAPPs
Links 27/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Volvo and More Evidence of 'AI' (Slop) Being a Passing Fad
Links for the day
The Code of Conduct (CoC) Gaslighting Phenomenon
There are still many people and projects foolish enough to outsource their labour to Microsoft via GitHub
Anouk Rozestraten (Deputy Director) Appears to Have Left the Free Software Foundation
Let's hope Rozestraten is still using and promoting Free software
There's Nothing Funny About Lawbreaking
There's plenty of room in society for humour, but "hacking" the state by breaking laws isn't cool or hip
More Mass Layoffs Coming Soon to Microsoft, Just a Question of When and How Many
Numbers from Washington were close to 5% and judging by prior rumours, it would be 5% + 5% (total 10%) at a later month
Links 27/05/2025: Bikes, Ideal Computers, and BYO
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 26, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 26, 2025
Richard Stallman's Milan Talk (Public Presentation) Was Packed, Video Available Soon
Looks like they even ran out of seats
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: Intangible Stuff and Slop Issues
Links for the day
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part I: Complaints to IRS or USDOJ Needed
If enough people do it, this will be more effective, more so if people who are based in the US do it
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbying and the OSI's Status at Stake
At the end we plan to summarise all the issues in one very long article
Breaking Into Other People's Devices Without Authorisation Isn't "Funny" or "Research"
“Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man.”
The Issue Isn't the Internet, the Issue is How People Are Taught to Use or Misuse It
The Web is circling down the drain. The Internet is not.
A Healed Reputation of a Movement's Leader and His Robust Message
The more aggressively you push against resistors, the more credibility they will gain
Links 26/05/2025: Deletions from Microsoft's GitHub, Telegram Blocked in Vietnam
Links for the day
Linux Released Last Night and There's Already LLM Slop With Slop Images
BetaNoise does not seem to mind this anymore
Links 26/05/2025: Walmart Layoffs and DRM Dumpster Fire ('Old' Fire TV Devices Lose Netflix Access)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: USB Camera Viewer and Fantasy Life
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 25, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, May 25, 2025