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”.

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    924·
    3 months ago

    Why not just be a web browser and leave stuff like this to browser extensions?
    Oh right, you enshittified yourself.

    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.

  • kn0wmad1c@programming.devEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    IANAL, but I don’t think T&Cs are really legally binding and can be easily fought against in court.

    • InputZero@lemmy.ml
      151·
      3 months ago

      While true, it requires time and money to get a case before the court. Which most people don’t have. If your rights require you to invest your time and money against a much larger adversarial party in court, then it’s not your rights that are being protected in the first place. Right now Big Tech is more worried about us exercising our rights instead of being afraid of trampling on them in the first place.

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1722·
    3 months ago

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

      • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        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.

      • Xanis@lemmy.world
        104·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
          61·
          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

      • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
        8·
        3 months ago

        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?

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      17·
      3 months ago

      Best I can do is accepting three options: “Yes,” “No,” and “Remind me later.”

      “Not now” or “No, I don’t want this awesome feature” bullshit infuriates me.

    • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
      101·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, corporate dark patterns really don’t respect consent. When would you like to know more: Now, or Later?

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        26·
        3 months ago

        Though I don’t mind the “accept, deny, ask me again later” for when something seems interesting but I don’t want to put the effort into looking into it right at the moment but don’t want to click yes without looking into it.

  • Auzy@beehaw.org
    19·
    3 months ago

    Seems like you can press the not now button

    Not a big deal…

    • xcjs@programming.dev
      10·
      3 months ago

      I consider it a big deal. I’m clicking “Not Now” buttons all day when I just want to use a piece of software for its main purpose. And then because it says “Not Now” I get asked again and again and again.

  • Napain@lemmy.ml
    44·
    3 months ago

    didn’t the Firefox management say they would focus on their core product rather than random little services like this

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      82·
      3 months ago

      At this point, I’m glad I switched to Mull on my phone. It took a bit of overcoming the resistance of using Firefox for decades (Stockholm syndrome), but I don’t miss Firefox one bit.

      Now I need to do that on my desktop, but I’m still shopping. Librewolf? Palemoon? Ice Weasel? What are folks here trying out these days?

      • astro_ray@lemdro.idOPEnglish
        61·
        3 months ago

        On Android I am using Waterfox. Still looking for alternatives on desktop.

      • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
        41·
        3 months ago

        Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork? The UI seems to be identical to me - don’t notice any other differences on my phone

        • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
          9·
          3 months ago

          Yes, it’s Firefox without the bullshit.

          It’s ironic that Firefox started the same way, actually.

          When Netscape open sourced its browser and then fucked it up, some folks took the source code and built “Phoenix,” much, much later becoming Firefox.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
          4·
          3 months ago

          Isn’t Mull basicslly Firefox since it’s just a Firefox-based fork?

          I don’t understand why that would be a bad thing. If Firefox starts to enshittify then a fork from before the enshittification is exactly what I want.

          • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zipEnglish
            6·
            3 months ago

            It’s not - quite the contrary. I was just wondering what the commenter that I replied to meant when they said that it took them some getting used to. For me, it’s just a slight change in design and a different icon

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      31·
      3 months ago

      Yeah but to be fair they bought this years ago. Just took them forever to integrated. I suspect any changes in direction will truly show in 3-4 years, once the current backlog (no don’t look at my company’s Jira, TYVM! 😑 ) is cleared.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6517·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      12·
      3 months ago

      And why is it useless?

      It’s not useless. It’s just that it’s bloatware that’s unnecessary for many.

      Like a car with a bright orange “Order Bird Food” button in the middle of the dashboard. If you don’t own any birds, then it sucks.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
        35·
        3 months ago

        Nothing new in the helm of browsers. Pockets is a extension baked into the browser.

        Many browsers have VPN/Ad Block native to the browser. Opera GX have all that bullshit that surprising can deceive a lot of normies to use it.

        Sadly this type of bloat sells as “features” to some people and Mozilla gains users with it. Btw I’m not defending this practice I just seeing for what it is, marketing.

        • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
          6·
          3 months ago

          Sure, sure, other browsers do it. But I expected more of Mozilla.

          Pocket was already bad enough, but it was kiiiiinda related to browsing anyway - it was a glorified bookmarking tool. It had a nice purpose too - save pages for online reading - but they seem to have gotten rid of that and I’m mad about it.

    • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      231·
      3 months ago

      Using AI to detect AI is completely useless. It’s been a big issue in academics, where a professor will plug your essay into an AI detector and then you get dinged for plagiarism because your entirely handwritten essay gets marked as AI. It’s just glorified pattern matching, it has no concept of real or fake.

      • Laurentide@pawb.socialEnglish
        121·
        3 months ago

        If the AI could really detect any discrepancies between human and AI-generated text, it would stop making them.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5910·
      3 months ago

      People shouldn’t trust Mozilla either. It’s a company that does company things. Just because it’s not as far-gone as Google doesn’t mean it’s incapable.

      • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
        92·
        3 months ago

        I never said they should trust. But if they trust Mozilla with the telemetry/pockets/whatever they put on the browser this one is just like the others.

      • sudo@lemmy.today
        137·
        3 months ago

        just because its not as far-gone as Google

        The fact that the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, despite wherever controversy there may be around their decisions of late, is a pretty significant factor.

        • LWD@lemm.ee
          13·
          3 months ago

          Mozilla Foundation has no members, it’s operated by the for-profit Corporation, and the Corporation is powered by its profit motive.

          • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8·
            3 months ago

            Even worse, the majority of its revenue comes from Google for making it the default search engine.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      221·
      3 months ago

      I trust Mozilla to do what they promise with my private data

  • Xenny@lemmy.world
    7·
    3 months ago

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

  • MrQuallzin@lemmy.world
    2811·
    3 months ago

    I actually love Fakespot. I’ve had it installed as an extension for years, but now it’s native

  • mogoh@lemmy.ml
    5·
    3 months ago

    Is this for sure built-in and not some extension? I don’t have it.

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
    211·
    3 months ago

    Please tell me there’s an about:config setting to turn this bs off.

      • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
        20·
        3 months ago

        Nice. Thank you. For those who don’t click the link, it appears you can disable by setting these flags:

        browser.shopping.experience2023.active

        and:

        browser.shopping.experience2023.survey.enabled

        To false.

        EDIT: On finally getting back to my desktop and disabling these, it looks like there’s a bunch of these browser.shopping.experience2023 flags. Some of them set to true, others false, I just set them all to false.

  • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
    4·
    3 months ago

    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.