Seriously, every post I read that's upvoted is smack talking Mozilla in every way possible and it just so happens to take place exactly when Google quietly announces Manifest V3. Mozilla is not our enemy, Google is. Don't let all these bot upvoted comments and posts let you forget that. Has Mozilla made some questionable moves lately? Yeah.. the biggest being the purchase of Anonym.

We'll just have to wait and see how that turns out. But I found it amusing when I saw this post and it got so many upvotes immediately after Mozilla announced the purchase.

Then Mozilla allegedly fired someone because he has cancer.

Then I was reading Mozilla android browser is suddenly the worst and least secure android browser.

It's never ending.. Honestly I think I am just going to take some time away from Reddit because it's becoming such a corporate shill and bot upvoted cesspool. I'm sure this will get heavily down-voted but I just wanted to give my two cents. Mozilla will always be my preferred choice for privacy and security and unless I see some actual changes within the browsers no one will ever convince me otherwise.

I had two Amazon accounts from two different countries a while ago. I deleted one of them 5+ years ago.

Recently I got a notification from Amazon that someone was trying to login to my account and it provided the 6 digit code. Only it went to the email address of the old account.

So I go and try logging into that account myself. I noticed if I entered what I remembered the password to be, it would send me a verification email. Then if I entered the 6 digits, it would clearly say that my account is closed and I need to contact support.

If I entered a random string instead of my password, it would just say the account doesn't exist.

So they still have a record of both the email and password I was using a good 5+ years ago.

Dodgy fucks.

This week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

Mozilla, (the URL is literally "AI services in Firefox")

In the first experiment that you can try out this week, you will be able to:

Add a chatbot of your choice to the sidebar, so you can quickly access it as you browse.

Select and send text from webpages to:

• Summarize the excerpt and make it easier to scan and understand at a glance.

• Simplify language. We find this feature handy for answering the typical kids’ “why” questions.

• Ask the chatbot to test your knowledge and memory of the excerpt.

Mozilla,

Hello everyone. I've decided to share with you links to various temporary email services. Please be careful, as some of them may compromise your confidentiality.

GOOD privacy policy:

BAD privacy policy, but good functionality:

What temporary email services do you know?

Civil rights and privacy advocates are incensed that protections against data-driven discrimination and bias in artificial intelligence have been stripped from the most recent draft of federal comprehensive data privacy legislation.

The latest version of the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) became public late Thursday with several significant changes, including most notably the deletion of two sections of the bill covering civil rights protections and algorithmic bias guardrails.

The revised bill, first published by Punchbowl News, will be debated in a House Energy and Commerce Committee markup reportedly scheduled for Thursday. Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and her Senate counterpart, Maria Cantwell (D-WA)  the first draft of the bill in April.

While advocates have focused much of their ire on the new draft’s exclusion of civil rights and algorithmic bias protections, they are also separately concerned that the latest legislative text does not give adequate privacy protections to data collected on individuals’ personal devices.

“As written, there are very few protections for that data, which would allow companies to engage in all kinds of privacy-intrusive practices because data minimization, opt outs, transparency and other provisions would not apply to data processed on a device,” Eric Null, co-director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Recorded Future News.

The new language means the bill’s protections would not apply when the data that a company collects or processes is pulled directly from a personal device rather than a company’s servers, Null said. 

In foregoing protections for data on personal devices, Congress has created what the advocacy group the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law calls a  “massive loophole.“ 

This loophole will only grow bigger as AI and computing become “more powerful, allowing more processing to occur on a device,” they said in a blistering critique published Monday.

It will also make the federal legislation weaker than the state data privacy laws it would preempt, they said.

Reported by Suzanne Smalley on therecord.media:

Wondering what the impacts of AI and online privacy will be. Any thoughts? Will online anonymity disappear with the implication of AI?!

What other good alternatives to google maps that are privacy focused are there? I've tried mainly OmsAnd but I find it to be really confusing and come back to google maps.

Another question is "should I be worried about if google is selling personal data through google maps?" If google maps isn't bad when it comes to privacy and personal data collection then I'd like to just stay with it but otherwise, if there is something better I'd love to know

Third-party mouse tracking services like hotjar claim their user session recordings are anonymous, but how true is that?

I'm skeptical personally. We've all heard the same thing about "anonymous medical data sets" where there's still enough information in the data set like race/height/weight/diseases/etc to link the data to a specific person. That's even before considering things like data breaches and configuration errors.

The lady at the corner store told my dude I bought paraphernalia. are they allowed to do that??

So she just became a realtor and found a small operation to start working at. She’s now asking everyone she knows if she can add their info to her company’s database to send out their info and such. Why would they want that despite my sister knowing we’re no where closing to even looking at buying. Is it a scam of some sort? Also how do I kindly tell my sister no? I come from family where you blindly support each other no questions asked, but I certainly don’t want my info out there and possibly stolen.

I use Linux and CalyxOS on my phone. I spent many hours to research and configure things. I feel I'm tired, but i can't just start to use Windows, even tweaked LTSC and GApps even on custom ROM. Anyone faced this problem? How did you deal with that?

She got it as a gift from her dad. I haven't talked to her about how much I hate this idea yet, but I also know she's pretty technically illiterate and probably doesn't hold the same view I do when it comes to surveillance capitalism. Any suggestions?