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".
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?
Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
Oh right, you enshittified yourself.Show
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.
You are not wrong. I got curious how much they receive in donations, but could not find anything about it in their financial statements.
That is where I looked and could not find it, albeit only on my short commute from work.
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.
didn't the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this
Actually I thought there new ceo said they were going to fuck around with AI stuff.
Edit:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/?guccounter=1
The real reason people want to revoke the second amendment is so Mozilla will stop constantly pointing guns at their own feet.
I actually use fakespot a lot, but will never install an add-on for this.
I got that notice a few months ago, but I didn't use either button on the bottom. I used the X on the top, and haven't seen it since.
<rant>I thought we were done with the age of Toolbars, but here we are, back there. An app or add-on for every damn thing. No, I don't want this integrated into my browser. No, I don't need your HTML5 app on my phone to do less than the webpage does. No, I don't want your spyware app to view the one-off Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram link a friend sends me. No, I don't mean 'maybe later', I mean 'no forever'.</rant>
I know ... But people actually literally want this.
Maybe FF is what we install for normies while we use forks for other flavours.
people actually literally want this
Who’s tearfully begging for a chatbot to tell them what a review page says instead of just clicking on the page and reading the actual reviews wtf
Normies.
Our IT department is constantly getting tickets to unblock random shitty stuff like that.
I cannot explain it, not even a little, I just know it's a thing.
Perhaps the general ad infestation of everything blurred the lines.
In a way, in the immediate sense of the moment, being sold bullshit by AI/algorithms or irl by a sales person isn't that much different. And people don't care about tomorrow or anything they can't immediately see.
(Im guessing, all of it)
Does fakespot have a chatbot? I thought it predated LLMs and is basically just some human-made algorithms to filter out suspicious reviews.
I'm not opposed to the tool itself but they can fuck off with pushing it onto us. If I want to see the newest Firefox features I'll go the main site and find them.
i did not get a pop up on a amazon page maybe a us only thing idk but its ironic how firefox advertises Privacy related feature
I was happy when they used an entirely on-device AI to generate alt text for photos, but this is just ridiculous. They quite literally already have an extension that does the exact same thing this new "feature" offers.
Firefox was supposed to be a less bloated than chrome, but all they've done now is continued to add more and more to the browser that nobody actually asked for.
Give me bug fixes, UX and performance improvements, not entire sidebar popups for review checking that only works on 3 stores on the entire internet.
I'm starting to worry about Mozilla. Firefox is still the best browser, and I've used it for many years... but there are more and more anti-features popping up that require a few settings to be changed. No one thing is a big deal, but I'm starting to feel the same way about Firefox as I did about Windows before I stopped using it: like it's just trying to trick me into doing something I don't want to do rather than aiming to be a good product.
I'm thinking specifically about the address bar getting 'search suggestions' from Google by default; and the special 'ad effectiveness tracking' that is turned on by default to help Facebook. Privacy should always be the default setting. We shouldn't have to keep up-to-date with the latest features and settings just so that we know what to disable!
