• 175 Posts
  • 182 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle













  • I added a section to my post with some additional comment.

    I began thinking of privacy because Mozilla was clearly thinking of it when designing this feature, but I don’t think they really thought it through.

    People’s browsers are visiting pages that they never intended to. If a random extension did that, you would say that it was violating your privacy. The browser does it, and you get people defending it as “optional”. Yes, but the user never installed the malware extension that is leaking your privacy. It is your browser doing it in an automated update.

    If you don’t think this is a privacy issue, why doesn’t the next version of Firefox just visit every page on every page that I visit, so that when I hover over a link, I can get a link preview immediately, without needing to wait. That would save me some real time and effort!


  • As opposed to the case where you don’t have a link preview, and you click on a website to see what it contains, and they get your IP. The author seems to think Mozilla should have protected our privacy by having someone act as the proxy for the request. Because involving a thirds party that receives all these requests and does work for us for free is absolutely how we protect our privacy.

    But that is exactly what Mozilla is telling us – trust us.

    Why was the feature added if my browser is going to browse to the page anyway? What is the value add? I was looking for some way for it to make sense - ah right, it could be a privacy preserving feature - I can preview the link and verify whether I want to visit it before I actually visit it. But that isn’t how it works.

    Yes, a feature clearly designed for pushing onto that juicy “people with mobility impairments” userbase.

    Love that you ignore all of the people who are currently seeing the popups and not understanding why.