this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024

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Mozilla adds stupid AI stuff with horrible T&C (lemdro.id)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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".

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I hope that Ladybirdy gets something good happening. I simply having a another browser in this space would give Mozilla a good sanity check for their direction and values. Otherwise they're just kind of fumbling around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

There's Verso now too, a Servo based browser.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

Internet or other electronic network activity (e.g., browsing history, search history, information regarding an individual's interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement, and online viewing activities)

Category of Third Parties to Whom Personal Information is Sold and/or Shared: Advertising partners, Service providers

Just a snippet of the privacy policy. There's other bad stuff too like location tracking. It's also all ran through Google analytics.

So much for a privacy respecting Mozilla

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

And people thought Mozilla became an ad company when they bought the other ad company. Nope. I'm tracing it back to right here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Firefox is gone for me. Too long with minor issues hanging around while they focus on the issues above.

Let me browse, bookmark, and thats pretty much it. Allowing me to save passwords okay fine but all that other stuff just no way

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

For the new AI review feature, we are the product not the customers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

How does "waiving your right to a lawsuit" hidden in a terms and conditions apply? I bet it doesn't

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Cool it with the universal AI hate. There are many kinds of AI, detecting fake reviews is a totally reasonable and useful case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

but it does not work. This stuff never does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean by "this stuff?" Machine learning models are a fundamental part of spam prevention, have been for years. The concept is just flipping it around for use by the individual, not the platform.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

bayesian filtering, yes. Llm's? no

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I have large doubts on an AIs ability to reliably spot fakes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If by reliably you mean 99% certainty of one particular review, yeah I wouldn't believe it either. 95% confidence interval of what proportion of a given page's reviews are bots, now that's plausible. If a human can tell if a review was botted you can certainly train a model to do so as well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

AI: "This is definitely a fake review because I wrote it."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There are literal bots on Reddit with less complexity able to measure the likelihood of a story being reliable and truthful, with facts and fact checkers. They're not always right, they ARE useful though. Or were. Not sure about now, been over a year since I left.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Would you mind pointing me in the direction of those AIs since the newfangled factcheck bot seems to just pull its data from a premade database, so no AI here on Lemmy

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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?)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The real reason people want to revoke the second amendment is so Mozilla will stop constantly pointing guns at their own feet.

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