PSA (?): just got this popup in Firefox when i was on an amazon product page. looked into it a bit because it seemed weird and it turns out if you click the big “yes, try it” button, you agree to mandatory binding arbitration with Fakespot and you waive your right to bring a class action lawsuit against them. this is awesome thank you so much mozilla very cool

https://queer.party/@m04/112872517189786676

So, Mozilla adds an AI review features for products you view using Firefox. Other than being very useless, it’s T&C are as anti-consumer as it possibly can be. It’s like mozilla saying directly “we don’t care about your privacy”.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      16·
      2 months ago

      Best I can do is accepting three options: “Yes,” “No,” and “Remind me later.”

      “Not now” or “No, I don’t want this awesome feature” bullshit infuriates me.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        We had a whole generation of people that were taught that ‘no’ means ‘maybe later’ (the whole point of the ‘no means no’ ads about daterapes), and that same generation is now running these companies. What did we expect to happen?

  • nia_the_cat@lemmy.world
    127·
    2 months ago

    Hot take and I can guarantee this will be downvoted but I think people are putting way too much blind trust into Mozilla for this. (edit: Apparently not here, pleasantly surprised at that)

    They just purchased an advertising company, they made the T&C waive your right to a class action lawsuit. They keep giving their CEO raises and laying off their workers. Mozilla is actively enshittifying but people don’t react until it’s too late because it’s a boiling frog situation.

    Whether you think the feature is useful or not, Firefox is unfortunately shifting away from being a privacy-focused user-focused browser. The saving grace is that it is open source and forks can be made of it, “Firefox” itself can survive anything as long as there’s enough interest to keep it alive.

    I think that Mozilla does great work, but they’ve lost sight of their goals, and are changing focus. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this needs to be looked at objectively instead of with brand-loyalty. At the end of the day, they’re just another company with financial interests prioritized over user interests.

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    80·
    2 months ago

    Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
    Oh right, you enshittified yourself.

    Edit to add: Why give them money when they apparently already have too much of it from corporate inputs (most of it from Google)? I think they ask us for donations in order to retain their non-profit image, for PR purposes.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    Fakespot is from Mozilla, if you trust Mozilla, why don’t you trust Fakespot?

    And why is it useless? With the amount of fake AI reviews an AI to detect them is not completely useless.

    But the popup is annoying.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      56·
      2 months ago

      People shouldn’t trust Mozilla either. It’s a company that does company things. Just because it’s not as far-gone as Google doesn’t mean it’s incapable.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      21·
      2 months ago

      I trust Mozilla to do what they promise with my private data

    • lone_faerieEnglish
      21·
      2 months ago

      Using AI to detect AI is completely useless. It’s been a big issue in academics, where a professor will plug your essay into an AI detector and then you get dinged for plagiarism because your entirely handwritten essay gets marked as AI. It’s just glorified pattern matching, it has no concept of real or fake.

      • Laurentide@pawb.socialEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 months ago

      And why is it useless?

      It’s not useless. It’s just that it’s bloatware that’s unnecessary for many.

      Like a car with a bright orange “Order Bird Food” button in the middle of the dashboard. If you don’t own any birds, then it sucks.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.

        Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.

        Sadly this type of bloat sells as “features” to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I’m not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.

        • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
          6·
          2 months ago

          Sure, sure, other browsers do it. But I expected more of Mozilla.

          Pocket was already bad enough, but it was kiiiiinda related to browsing anyway - it was a glorified bookmarking tool. It had a nice purpose too - save pages for online reading - but they seem to have gotten rid of that and I’m mad about it.

  • LWD@lemm.ee
    42·
    2 months ago

    FakeSpot is a hilarious company run by trend chasers, “crypto enthusiasts and web3 believers.”

    If Mozilla chasing the AI trend isn’t bad enough, and their privacy policy doesn’t hurt your soul, FakeSpot also only works on the biggest and most predatory platforms (Walmart and Amazon).

  • Napain@lemmy.ml
    39·
    2 months ago

    didn’t the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 months ago

      At this point, I’m glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don’t miss Firefox one bit.

      Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I’m still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?

      • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don’t notice any other differences on my phone

        • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
          10·
          2 months ago

          Yes, it’s Firefox without the bullshit.

          It’s ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.

          When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built “Phoenix,” much, much later becoming Firefox.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
          5·
          2 months ago

          Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork?

          I don’t understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.

          • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            It’s not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it’s just a slight change in design and a different icon

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 months ago

      Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don’t look at my company’s Jira, TYVM! 😑 ) is cleared.

  • thegreenguy@sopuli.xyz
    30·
    2 months ago

    AI shit alone, I never understood the urge to build a whole OS in the browser. I want my browser to view websites. If I want more, then I can install extensions. I’d rather them release this as some sort of “official” extension. Might switch to LibreWolf (do you have any other suggestions?)

    • Wave@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Libre wolf for privacy w/ customization, Mullvad for anonymity & blending into the crowd

  • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
    27·
    2 months ago

    I’ve used Firefox since it was released. I will be considering other browsers due to this. I do not want AI in my products.

      • TomMasz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        Floorp

        Thanks, these look interesting. I’ve been using Firefox forever for my personal browsing (but Edge for work) and I’d prefer to stay with it if I can.

      • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
        16·
        2 months ago

        Different priorities for different people. The AI is what I really have an issue with right now. I’m sick of it being shoved down everyone’s throats, and I have big ethical concerns about it in general.

    • astro_ray@lemdro.idOPEnglish
      30·
      2 months ago

      If someone wanted it, they could’ve installed the Firefox extension, but now for users who doesn’t want this, they have an intrusive feature that is just a bloat. Also, even if I wanted it, it’s fairly useless unless you live in western countries.

        • Luffy879@lemmy.ml
          12·
          2 months ago

          Because not many people from somewhere like greece shop on walmart or best buy, and many people who use Firefox also are anti amazon

        • antler@feddit.rocks
          1·
          2 months ago

          apt remove firefox (or via pacman, windows settings etc)

          Otherwise should be a bunch of flags you can set in about:config

        • astro_ray@lemdro.idOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I beluga there is an about:config setting to disable it. You can find more details somewhere in the comments of this post or the original post that I quoted.