The fact that someone in the organisation actually thought "on let's approach Google and ask for this special agreement" shows a naïvety that really shouldn't exist in a company I'm supposedly trusting to protect my privacy.
I really hope this kind of non-sense starts changing in Mozilla soon. This post is promising, but—as the gp points out—still not without glaring irony/hypocrisy.
What's naive about it when they _got Google to agree under contract_? Let's turn that around instead: I really hope this kind of sensible demand becomes wider spread, with more people going to Google saying "we only want to use your tools if the data is anonymised and you do this under a contractual obligation that we can sue you over if you ever violate, as a partner agreement rather than a service/customer relation".
Plenty of huge sites out there could quite easily demand the same thing without affecting ABC's bottom line while making the lives of others better in incremental steps.
"Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA before we would ever implement it on our websites. GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties.
We now have two check boxes in our GA premium account that allows us to opt-out of additional usage of our data. Because Mozilla pushed Google so hard, those two check boxes are available to every other GA user in the world regardless if they have a premium account like we do. GA also doesn't track IPs or store PII within the tool."
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Seriously, those bastards.
Only having internal controls and debate, sustained legal engagement, and ultimately DNT-obedience.
"GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties."
(emphasis mine) am I the only one who finds the usage of the word provide odd? Literally it means GA had to list what and how (insinuating they blindly trust GA to do only what it says it does). Not-literally but the flow of the phrase makes it seem like they want to convey "GA had to prove how and what ..." but without actually making that claim. In the case Mozilla does have proof why don't they share the anonymization framework with proofs? In case they don't we are supposed to be OK with their feigned naivety?
Google is a company that have a track-record of breaking the law to contravene user-privacy. They are also Mozilla's primary competitor (albeit also a large revenue source). Please tell me how, as a company selling oneself on user-privacy, approaching such a company to negotiate a contract that ensures you can continue sending them your users' data is not naïve? Calling it naïve is kind, as the alternative is malice.
No matter what way you cut it, Mozilla is sending your data to Google's servers, and they're deciding what to do with that data. An opt-out contract doesn't change any of that.
> I really hope this kind of sensible demand becomes wider spread, with more people going to Google saying "we only want to use your tools if...
To turn that around, you're going to Google saying "your market dominance makes your tools are so indispensable to our business, that we would rather go through an expensive year long legal discussion with you to negotiate better terms that consider alternative competing solutions"
Hey, don't tell me, tell Mozilla if you know of any established alternatives. Bearing in mind this is part of a multi-year funding agreement between two (not even close to competitor) companies, where the "offer our search" is the price for receiving literally hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. If Google was really Mozilla's competitor, we wouldn't even be talking about this: you don't give your competitor money to keep them afloat. Not in America.
And incredibly, Mozilla talked Google down from their normally "and we get everything your users do" conditions to only "and you make us a trivially changed default search engine, and we are under contractual obligation to anonymise the data we get through our GA channel. And offer everyone in the world the option to have that same anonymisation turned on. For free". That alone is worth one-time changing a search engine after installation. After all, you get this product for free, and you're even given every possible way for you to customize it should you not like any of the default settings, from default search engine to default skin to default webgl hardware binding settings.
So if you still think none of that was worth doing, and just seeing google.com find you search results, but clicking three times to change that is too much work, then... I don't know man. I don't think browsers are for you.
Not really, unless a fine 0.002% of their revenue counts.
> and change their ways?
On that specific issue, after being investigated for it, it seems so. On any other handling of personal data, one can only make assumptions based on their ethical record.
It's to assume that in a company as large as Google it's impossible to know what happens with the data and where its stored and where it gets commingled and when maybe even devs are granted access for "debugging". If you give the data away, it's gone, no control. Facebooks issues taught as that.
I really hope this kind of non-sense starts changing in Mozilla soon. This post is promising, but—as the gp points out—still not without glaring irony/hypocrisy.