Pocket doesn't collect any browsing history. From the linked docs:

> If the “Recommended by Pocket” feature is enabled, Pocket will send a list of the best stories on the web to Firefox every day. With each story, Pocket also sends a list of related websites that, when visited, signal likely interest in the story. Your Firefox browser compares your browsing history with the list of related websites to sort and filter through each day’s stories and recommend the ones that are most likely to interest you.

> Important Note: Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history. The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox.

The feature isn't "EU-excepted", it's "US-only", probably because they only have recommendations for US audiences.

It's quite a nice approach. It's practically optimizing the list of related websites to increase click through rates.

The problem I have with “Recommended by Pocket”, is that it only recommend left-wing discourse. Great for creating a filter bubble…

Wanted to make counter-argument, opened new tab, found you are right. Google Chrome mobile on the other hand gives me both sides.

I have no idea if they have a bias on what they send to Firefox, but their approach (send stories with a list of other sites that signal you might be interested) is obviously going to facilitate a filter bubble. Is your usual filter bubble right wing? If it is that suggests a bias on their part, otherwise maybe they're just amplifying your left wing browser history?

Where does it say it's because of EU privacy laws? Could just be that they test the feature on one market first or am I mistaken?

As kibwen has commented, in Mozilla's official statement (which is legally binding), they say that they don't collect anything, so yeah.

Yeah, that's why I set the "extensions.pocket.enabled" to "false" in my about:config. It's such a weird feature in an otherwise pleasant browser.

I have that setting as well. The new config specifically for this is "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored", you might want to flip it too just in case. The config name doesn't specifically reference pocket - so perhaps it could be used in other ways as well.

What evidence do you have they they violate EU privacy laws? Just because they aren't don't it in the EU doesn't mean they can't.

Does Pocket Sponsored Stories violate privacy? It doesn't seem like they track the user or anything like that. And, Mozilla claims their approach is "Privacy-Conscious".

They don't. It's done locally in the browser.

Nothing to do with privacy laws. User base and for Pocket is likely larger in US which makes suggestion more accurate.

Yes.

Firefox is basically adware now.

Not sure why this comment is grey, FF is now adware by objective definition of the word adware.

Wiki >Adware, or advertising-supported software, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during the installation process

Because by that definition Firefox has been adware since Firefox 1.5, released in 2005, due to the ubiquitous "Google" logo in the search box that every user sees by default upon installing the browser, and for which Firefox receives the bulk of its revenue.

That's significantly more defensible (it has to search somewhere by default, and most engines are known by their logos, and Google is the only search engine worth a crap) than imposing paid sites on you by default.

No, they could innovate by making a web browser that browses the web. Search is a prime candidate for extension functionality.

I've no desire to go back to the days of per-vendor search plugins like we had back around IE7, and neither do most.

Search has been a basic part of using the web for years now. All browsers support the OpenSearch standard. Now, you may feel it would be better for a user to have to manually add Google to their search bar, but relegating search entirely to an extension is an odd suggestion.

And having installed Linux Mint a lot of times, I can tell you that having to switch from a non-google default search in Firefox is really annoying.

Can't speak to the greying as I have no part in that. That said, while I agree to a point, to me, adware is where ads are being served that are impacting the UI proper. Because of where it happens, apparently in a new tab/window, it isn't adding advertisements when I go to a web page that weren't already there. I also don't have to do a specific action to get away from the ad: I don't have to close the ad directly, it just disappears as a result of me doing normal behavior. So while perhaps "adware" it isn't the annoying kind at the very least.

I don't use Firefox so I'm not sure what it is showing, but if it is like the new tab in Chrome that pocket's extension generates, it is basically the top 3 in the recommended section of Pocket which seems to be popular articles of no particular importance or targeted. Earlier I saw links to an article for a Ryan Reynolds interview where he talks about his anxiety (apparently, didn't read it) and another article about all cultures appropriating (again, didn't read, so going on title). If it were targeted, I'd expect articles of a more technology/development slant.

>... is software that generates revenue for its developer ...

does pocket suggesting stories somehow generate revenue for Mozilla?

Mozilla owns Pocket. They're not calling them Pocket Sponsored Stories to be cute. You, too, can now buy screen space in the premiere open-source browser: https://getpocket.com/sponsor

I think it's a disgrace.

I wish someone with the time would start producing a "De-Mozilla'ed" fork a la Chromium. I think Firefox has gotten to that point, things like this and the Mr. Robot fiasco indicate the project needs to be saved from itself.

Good news, that's what I've been working on here: https://github.com/afontenot/firefox-clean

The basically idea is not to "fork" Firefox per se, but to maintain a set of patches that are appropriate for a user-respecting privacy friendly browser. If a true fork one day becomes necessary, this would be a nice starting point. For now, I'm just trying to completely remove all bad code.

You do have to build the source yourself, however, since binaries can't be distributed without violating Mozilla's trademark.

Chromium is not a de-Googled Chrome. This is: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Well, it's trying to be. It's still millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of design decisions made by Google.

The same would be true for your wish of a Firefox-fork, though I'm not sure there's that much sense in it, since what Mozilla has been doing has not infringed on privacy. You'd be patching out things that are harmless.

What's the Mr. Robot fiasco?

An extension popped up in the extension list, which did nothing at all, but had a weird name that made people panic they had somehow gotten malware.

And it was pushed as part of an unpaid marketing campaign for Mr. Robot. Which people thought was Mozilla cashing in big time by installing an extension they didn't want. It was done on a friendship basis. Mr. Robot has been pushing Firefox and so Mozilla wanted to give something back.

Which was a fun little easter egg that Mr. Robot fans could have activated. It would have flipped some words on webpages upside down as reference to Mr. Robot. Which, again, it didn't do, it did nothing unless you specifically went into about:config and activated it there (which is what Mr. Robot fans should have figured out themselves).

This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.

...in their browser that people are ok with them auto-updating, through which they can push even less restricted code than in an extension, and that completely invisible.

So, it was a fuck-up on Mozilla's part (in that the extension was visible in the extension list; if that wouldn't have been the case, it wouldn't have been a problem at all), but man was it blown out of proportion by journalists and know-it-alls, who just have to show that the innocent-thought Mozilla is evil.

>This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.

You snark, but at the end of the day, they really shouldn't be installing stuff silently and without affirmative consent. The character of the stuff is irrelevant to this principle.

Comes under the heading of "not their job".

Isn't it called Iceweasel?

Iceweasel was Debian's version necessary due to some trademark issue that was resolved last year. GNU Icecat is the fork with only free software.

> If you can't roll out a feature without violating EU privacy laws, you're not employing a "privacy-conscious approach."

Correction, 'you're not employing a "privacy-conscious approach" by EU standards'. The EU does not define for the world what privacy-conscious means.

Sure, but Mozilla's standards are far beyond what the EU demands, too. Which they are in this case as well, as this is not privacy-invading at all.

...and yet it does...

This is the first post I've seen that defends CDPR wholeheartedly. From everything I've heard, it's an overly broad, draconian code that is written to destroy any company the EU wishes.

You could go read the text of the GDPR if you wanted to know what it was, instead of going off what you've heard.