Mozilla enabled ads in Firefox and they're active in Fedora

[Lars Seipel]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 12:05:35PM +0200, Nikos Roussos wrote:
> True, as you also have to explicitly click a tile to send data to
> Mozilla.

Well, I don't think the act of hiding/closing an ad (by clicking on the
'x' attached to it) can be reasonably interpreted as informed consent.
Yet, it is explicitly listed among the tracked actions according to what
Darren Herman apparently told the advertiser community.

> No. We are talking about the tiles. I didn't see anyone suggesting we
> remove Google search. It's like the tiles feature crossed a line, which
> is far from truth.

I'm not sure about that. Besides the feature itself, there's also the
issue of the language used to explain it. Describing the placement of
advertisements as an "enhancement" to users, in my opinion, definitely
crosses the line to dishonesty and bullshitting of users.

Really, this stuff is communicated in a form of double-speak marketing
verbiage that I'm just not used to hear in communicating with open
source projects. Read the initial blog posts about it.

> I'm talking about the "advertisement" part. Some people seem to be
> bothered by this alone. Tiles feature indeed promotes some websites, but
> we already do that.

No, actually we don't. We promote websites because we honestly think
they're useful, not because we're paid to do so.

I don't think we should drop Firefox from the default installation. I
really like it, despite something at Mozilla going terribly wrong
lately. I do think this "feature" needs to be shipped as off by default,
though.