I'm not so sure. I think the privacy-functionality trade-off is understood and expected by the users, it woul be used by very few people if it were extremely spartan.
(But this instance, the favicon service, is not a good privacy-functionality trade-off)
Fourthed, and honestly it's strange that they are willing their promise to privacy on saving 2-3 queries on something as trivial as favicons? Why does no other browser need to do this?
By reading the subtitle 'a perfect ballance between privacy and usability' i think that it wont have privacy and might be less user friendly that other browsers.
Also, the statement that you try to collect less data doesn't says anything about privacy.
We probably have very different perspectives. I feel like I should warn you that you are very close to an ad hominem attack and I don't appreciate that.
My perspective from over a decade of software engineering is that you cannot ethically build a (privacy) feature that is "only ever to be opt in only" and not expect (privacy) experts to make a big deal about it ("hey everyone should opt in to this thing that makes your privacy better") and/or encourage other (browser) manufacturers to go ahead and make it default option ("this would make privacy better for non-expert users"). That's not an ethical feature, that's a bait-and-switch no matter what the timescale is between "this feature is opt-in only" and "oh no too many users opted in".
I am making a very opinionated judgement in leaping from it's not just a feature that was designed unethically, but that it was morally wrong for them to do so. It's fine if you don't agree that a bunch of people made a morally bad judgement call in building and marketing that feature. I believe that entire hype cycle of that feature did far more to setback privacy debates on the web for years than it did to help. I believe by making some of those morally wrong decisions years back Chrome established once (and maybe for all time) that their privacy teams cannot be trusted to build equitable/ethical/fair privacy systems. I worry that Mozilla is the last big opposition standing up to this behavior and I worry about what will happen if we lose Mozilla in this fight to keep an eye out for what other "privacy" ideas the Chrome team generates that should (rightfully) be deemed 'Harmful'.
I really don't expect you to agree with me at this point. The number of Firefox users left is abysmally tiny according to statistics. Chrome has won, despite whatever it is I (and I hope Mozilla continues to) think about their (lack of) professional ethics. At this point I'm only breaking it down for you as much as I can not to try to convince you, but to feel like I've done my part to say that I believe what Google did with DNT was very wrong, if not very evil, because there aren't a lot of people left to speak out against such wrongs. Because we as a profession don't have a proper ethics board to try these sorts of things in a court of our peers rather than let them fester and rot in the halls of companies that some people still believe the "Do No Evil" marketing despite actions they have taken.
Yes. And like so many other behaviours in the web-stack, I feel like I'm in a constant fight with my client software to please choose privacy over convenience. So it's worth being aware of where these tradeoffs exist. Especially when I'm writing that client software.
This seems to be a growing problem, even among so-called 'privacy advocates.' The last time I checked, EFF's Privacy Badger extension was designed around having no qualms about making exactly these types of bad trade-offs on users' behalf.
The cost of your privacy--even in the eyes of the EFF--sometimes is worth little more than reliably serving a font or a copy of jQuery and claiming to respect 'Do Not Track'.
Only if you have JavaScript enabled, which people who care about privacy are less likely to do. And even then it's not clear which products it applies to.
Whether or not you need it is tangential imo. People should be able to experience cool interactive visuals on websites without sacrificing their privacy
I think you overestimate the number of users who would either blanket-approve everything or switch to a browser that doesn't nag so much. Most people care very little about their privacy online.
Np - and you're probably right that I'm in the minority of people who'd care about having as much granular control as possible... maybe most people would rather something closer to a browser's privacy mode, so just a toggle on and off between very private and don't care about private?
I don't get why FF is mainly advertised as a 'privacy first' browser. I think most people first want ease of use and features, not privacy. And for them, Firefox may look like a niche program only for those who are paranoid or have something to hide. But in my opinion even if we don't count privacy, Firefox will still be a serious contender in all other areas and winner in many. At least for me it's not privacy that wins.
I don't think it is.
If we talk using the browser of one of the worlds foremost data collecting companies vs. mostly no tracking, if privacy is important it should outrank most small to medium convenience factors. Especially the ones that can easily be overcome by customization or familiarity.
While I think everyone should value their privacy, I did not mean that as an attack on you, but if a menu you never need to access once you learn some shortcuts is just as important a factor as being tracked on everything you do, you should reevaluate how important privacy really is to you.
Yeah you are right. Privacy remains a concern. If that happens, we will compromise privacy for quality. I like Google Chrome but still privacy remains an issue for me.
I use it. Over the last year or two this feature, in addition to a renewed effort towards privacy on my part has led me to simple not use websites which will not work with my privacy settings.
My only real hold outs in the "decidedly not private wise" camp are my gmail account used for various emails I still wish to receive but don't wish to give my email too and my old nick (this one here).
That seems like a reasonable trade-off. It's https so it's not visible to people snooping on you, and it being GET means that browser history and sharing links to searches works.
Plus, they do have an option to go POST-only, so if you don't like their already-very-private default you can change it.
(But this instance, the favicon service, is not a good privacy-functionality trade-off)
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