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Mozilla Turns Firefox Away from Open Source, Towards Spyware: Firefox Labs Now Requires Data Collection (www.quippd.com)

submitted 2 days ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@lemmy.world

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TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.

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[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In other words, this:

Mozilla never feature-gated new features behind data collection – simply downloading Firefox Nightly or Beta was enough to try out the newest features in testing.

is incorrect, as downloading Nightly or Beta is opting in to more data collection. See here, where it says:

Nightly is an unstable testing and development platform. By default, Nightly sends data to Mozilla — and sometimes our partners — to help us handle problems and try ideas.

And note that this was already the case before the new ToU, so it's probably unrelated to that.

/cc @yoasif@fedia.io @yoasif@mastodon.social

Edit: although of course the nuance here is that you can optout in Nightly and still use everything.

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, it sends data by default - but you can disable that. Not so for Firefox Labs.

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah I just realised that and was going to amend my comment - you're right, that is a difference. Still, "towards spyware" is a bit too strong for my tastes. Not to mention "turns away from open source", given that I don't think the source code for any of these features is hidden or not released under the MPL.