> How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my browsing history, profiling it and phoning back to the mothership?

If you search for "hotels", they'll show you suggestions that match "hotels".

Doesn't seem that complicated to me.

They didn't ask how can they make relevant suggestions. They asked how can they make relevant suggestions WITHOUT SPYING ON MY BROWSING HISTORY.

Try again.

I answered that already.

If you search for "hotels", they'll show you things related to "hotels".

That doesn't require access to your browsing history - it's right there in the search term.

Okay then maybe browsing history was too specific a term. It might not be in the list of URLs you have visited, but it is in a list of things you have searched. So your search history.

The principal is the same. People don't want their private lives (in part expressed through what they search for) exploited and exposed.

But I don’t want Mozilla to know what I’m searching for?

And that's your choice, and you're free to not enable this feature. I trust Mozilla with what I'm searching for more than I trust Google though

> When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.

I wish they'd give the about:config key to disable it as well as UI instructions in posts like this. The former can be set in a preferences file; so easily synchronised between machines and not forgotten when setting up a new one.

According to the page that you apparently didn't read, it's based on the search text you typed and your city location.

So,

Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace".

You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?

Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's being passed on, etc. Just a bunch of hand waving and "don't you worry, everything is tip-top".

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...

> You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?

If adMarketplace is just receiving from Mozilla a stream of (search text, city, clicked yes/no) then no, I don't see a problem with it.

If Mozilla sends a unique user ID as well then I would see a problem with it, but as far as I can tell, they don't.

You are OK that - by default - you type something in the Firefox address bar and some random company you've heard of gets a copy of it? You are A-OK with this?

Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.

For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.

Almost everything I search for goes to Google or some other search company, with a lot more metadata attached to it, so yes, I am OK with that apparently.

Its not by default. You have to turn this feature on.

You have to refuse turning it on.

The default, in friendly big blue colors, is to "Allow suggestions" with the alternative called "Customize in settings". It is also not clear if disabling "suggestions", switches off all its machinery or merely prevents them from being shown.

As others have said up this thread, the problem is not as much the feature itself, but the fact that Mozilla deemed it perfectly fine to roll out something like this in the first place.

It becomes increasingly obvious that Mozilla no longer understands (or cares!) what it was that made Firefox special, made people stick with it and what the motivation and priorities of these people are.

It was on by default for me.

Brave's take is having the user download a country-specific ad catalog so the browser can make decisions locally. Similar principle to why browsers download full blocklists of malicious sites instead of querying each address separately.

The trick is, you can't, unfortunately. You can have relevant ads that encroach on your privacy, or you can have possibly irrelevant ads that don't. If we are considering all possibilities, they could have precomputed some magic to do it all locally, but I have doubts about that because it seems more difficult to do that than just slap an identifier on your keystrokes and consult their ad-partner API.

Based off TFA, it looks like they don't send any sort of identifier to adMarketplace. By relevant they mean relevant to whatever you typed into the search bar this time, not relevant to your browsing history or things you previously typed into the search bar.

They should be more direct about what they mean, because to me, an engineer, that was not readily apparent without your interpretation of it.

The suggestions are shit just like any other platform, but they have to make the announcement look good to the advertisers :)