Firefox's new FakeSpot integration: the privacy problems

Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could “try” a new service, Fakespot, on the app.

What’s Fakespot? A review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox."

Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
“https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/138lqzt/thanks_to_the_state_of_california_mozillas_new”

Fakespot’s privacy policy allows them to collect and sell:

  • Your email address
  • Your IP address
  • Account IDs
  • A list of things you purchased and considered purchasing
  • Your precise location (which will be sent to advertising partners)
  • Data about you publicly available on the web
  • Your curated profile (which will also be sent to advertising providers)

Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search “merge” in both.)

Who asked for this? Who demanded integration into Firefox, since it was already a (relatively unpopular) browser extension people could have used instead?

Zerush, (edited )
@Zerush@lemmy.ml avatar

The real problem nowadays is, even though there are around 100 browsers to choose from, there are not much alternatives when you want to avoid big brother browsers, there are only Firefox or some forks (with some excepcions, mostly crappy and outdated), some indies, like Vivaldi and UR from small EU companies, Otter, SSuite Netsurf if you have Windows, and not much more, some text only browsers apart.

possiblylinux127,

Librewolf is good for now. However I think its time we get a new web browser with a separate web engine

bamboo,

Easier said than done, it’d take a large engineering team and a decade just to catch up with existing implementations. And in doing so you’ll probably stumble through all the same issues Mozilla has and end up as a large morally compromised nonprofit on the other end.

jman6495,

So jarring that you couldn’t just… Press no?

Rocha,

Urr durr Brave bad Firefox perfect and always good.

/s

LWD,

Brave also constantly bloats up their browser with privacy-invasive crap and ads for paid products (both theirs and third parties’), right out of the box. That’s why Brave sucks.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • privacy@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #