Posted 2 days ago

Summary: Another facepalm-worthy moment or a dumb post from Mozilla; they've just missed an opportunity to keep quiet, instead writing about "DATA STEWARDSHIP" (they should reject data collection instead, but they hire surveillance capitalists and are funded by them, too)

New spin on spyware won't make Mozilla any more popular. It's already bad enough as it is, with Mozilla getting into politics where there's no real need to. Why do they keep doing this? Burying Mozilla's own grave as a company...

I still remember some Canonical staff writing in defence of Raspberry Pi staff putting Microsoft spyware inside millions of Raspberry Pi devices, without users' consent and moreover covertly...

On what planet do these people live? Do they even understand why people adopt Free software?

"Remember that the 'data masters' of Audacity are also the masters of Firefox . Same tentacles, same mouths."For some background, see what we wrote about all that yesterday (there has been further coverage about this since). To be clear, it's very much possible that this tactless post boils down to the opinion of one single person, not the whole company (whose stance is the collective opinions of more than one person), but hours ago it was posted not just in the personal blog but also in "Data @ Mozilla" (blog.mozilla.org). The author is one of their "Telemetry" or "Data Science" people, who use proprietary Microsoft spyware (GitHub/NSA/PRISM) to develop spyware for Firefox. "Data @ Mozilla" = surveillance by Mozilla. I've long warned Mozillans to not veer in that direction... but in a Google-funded Mozilla it can be frowned upon when you berate surveillance, not when you support it or make excuses for it. All that "privacy" posing from Mozilla is ruined by the true face of the company, now citing a talk for a notorious DRM player/giant (Ubisoft Data Summit 2021) as if to say that some spying is just "Responsible Data Collection".

This was said in reference to Audacity, so should we assume that using an application which does not need an Internet connection (audio editor), unlike a browser, to spy on the user for the US government is OK? Is that what Mozilla is trying to tell us? Either way, this merely reaffirms the idea that Firefox funded by Google is just a coat of "open" paint on malware.

Of course it's possible for application developers and vendors to just not collect any data in the first place; if authorities insist on accessing some users' data, there's no route for compliance, hence the requests are moot. And that's how it should be. Remember that the 'data masters' of Audacity are also the masters of Firefox . Same tentacles, same mouths. ⬆