Yes for example Android setting Location to "on" and then hiding the setting at the end of half a dozen drill downs. And then, every now and then on a new update, suddenly and without notification, Location has been reset to "on".
I think he is right. One of the places google servers are used is captive portal checks [1]. Here is a, albeit not very deep, thread discussing how to disable it and you can easily find reports of losing internet access on lineage if you block google addresses on your network. Otherwise a connection to google servers is made every hour or so.
I remember reading, that this is not the only place in LOS, that google servers are used, but I never looked into it.
The captive portal check is a cookieless, cacheless request. Sure, you could argue Google "has your IP address" but it's a pretty absurd thing to worry about.
It's exactly as if the OS was created by Google. Google is a company whose entire business model is centered around collecting as much data as possible on as many people as possible for their own financial gain regardless of what those people want or the harms that it causes. They will do anything if it makes them money. What else would you expect from them?
I remember Android KitKat. It was the peak of the operating system. Every year since then a new version comes out that makes things slightly worse, often requested ux improvements get ignored, things people were doing that make their lives better but oppose Google's business model get broken or removed, UI elements get changed for silly design reasons that add friction to UX, and it never outweighs the good such as battery improvements and permissions management. I'm not even sure I'd classify it as an operating system anymore except superficially, you're not really operating your device with it, all you can really do is launch applications. You can't even change the default DNS server used globally by the system.
I do wish things were more configurable. A lot of things are excessively locked down.
But in general, Android is probably the OS I trust most. It has close to embedded-level reliability with almost consumer desktop level features.
Other platforms have to make a lot of compromises to achieve high availability, and are very simple, manual-first things like a very lightweight Linux.
The only real problem I have with the UI is the lack of an Undo, the fact that no browser lets you disable pull to refresh, and the few times I have found Bluetooth mysteriously turn itself off.
There's never any real confusion. I never have to read a manual or wonder where something is. It's perfect for a mobile platform, because you can do whatever you need to do right then and there, even if you haven't prepared for it or done it before.
What about the default setting to have Pocket forced down my throat, an inability to install custom/self-made extensions (permanently, not temporarily), and an inability to install any extension outside of the default mozilla provided one on mobile (besides fenix nightly)?
Yeah, Mozilla does some great things for privacy while at the same time pushing all kinds of new problems on Firefox users that have to be carefully disabled on each install. As long as they continue to give us the option to disable all the insecure and privacy violating features they add to Firefox, I'll continue using it. There's nothing better out there right now. but it does make articles (and headlines) like this a real problem.
At best we're left to assume that they're so disorganized that Mozilla has put out this article calling out a toxic practice they themselves are happy to continue participating in.
At worst we could look at this as Mozilla violating their user's privacy while also knowing that it's wrong and trying to trick Firefox users into thinking that Mozilla is looking out for the them and that Firefox wouldn't do the harmful things it's actually doing.
I very much wish Mozilla would either stand by the message in this article and disable the harmful defaults in their own browser or stop pretending to hold values they refuse to respect themselves.
In the end, the change being discussed in this article/advertisement is still a good thing for user's privacy and I get why they'd want to promote it as a feature of their browser often missing from others, but they could do that without the dishonest/contradictory messaging.
They really did ruin extensions on Android and have shown zero interest in fixing it in the past couple years.
Iceraven helps a bit, but there's virtually no incentive for someone to develop an extension for Fenix now. The pool of potential users would be small enough for Firefox itself, but its vastly smaller for Iceraven. I've been using Kiwi most of the time as it can use just about every extension available for desktop Chromium.
There were thousands of extensions available a couple years ago. Some of them weren't optimized for mobile and didn't provide a great UX. A few were outright broken. Users could install extensions from local storage, and installation from addons.mozilla.org was only blocked if the extension developer marked it as incompatible with mobile. In other words, it more or less had parity with the desktop experience.
Now, only recommended extensions, of which there are 18, can be installed on the release version. The nightly build makes it possible to install more extensions from the official site after jumping through a bunch of hoops[0]. Loading extensions from other sources is limited to a debug/development process that isn't viable for daily use[1].
Attempts by users and extension developers to communicate with the project about this issue have been deferred and stonewalled for the past couple years.
A bit ironic when your default search engine is Google, leading users to the dragon mouth by default.
Also when most if not all telemetry from mozilla firefox is opt out.
Including stuff like phoning home by default when you search, bookmarking something, delete anything from your history[1] and having a unique download token to track each install.[2]
Mozilla gets the majority of their revenue from Google paying them to keep their search engine as the default. I'm OK with this: the search engine is visible every time you use it, so it's impossible to "forget" to change it if you care about privacy, and the setting is relatively easy to find and change. Also, without this funding, Firefox would likely not exist. It's the price we pay for a good, free browser.
Of course, many have postulated that Google's motivation to pay Mozilla all that money is actually to ensure that Mozilla remains in business, rather than to directly increase Google's own revenue with the added search traffic. By keeping Mozilla in business, Google can more convincingly argue that they do not have a monopoly on browsers. It may be the case that without this argument, Chrome could be subject to regulations that could benefit consumer privacy, but after watching all the recent congressional hearings involving big tech companies, I have very little faith in that happening any time soon. It's better to keep Mozilla around for now, and the only way to do that without turning Mozilla into another Google is for Google to essentially subsidize them.
That and to keep the open source community pacified. If Firefox wasn't around it's very likely that the community will develop something much better which may be completely out of control for corporations.
Well yeah, that's why Apple gets a much bigger check. But they still buy the same thing on Safari where it's hard to claim it's for an eventual antitrust case.
Interesting project. But who are ohfp, stanzabird, fxbrit and all these other anonymous maintainers, and more importantly, why should I trust them to build my browser?
I hear this often in threads about LibreWolf. I've never experienced in my (somewhat limited) use of LibreWolf, could you give any examples of breakages you've experienced?
Is that true for Safari? I think the "Prevent cross-site tracking" option is enabled by default, which deletes cookies unless they're from the site you're actually visiting.
Except these things don't have to rely on them. It's absolutely possible to build a portal-style website, spanning multiple different-level domains, without third-party cookies.
It really is unfortunate that the most popular browser is made by the same company that controls the most popular search engine, the most popular video sharing service, the most popular email provider, and the most popular cloud storage/collaboration service. This should not be legal.
I'd rather have Google do this than go to multiple different disjoint sites. imagine without Google search, you go to Pinterest for wedding ideas, stackoverflow for questions, then target for a toaster oven, etc
I very much oppose there being "platforms" with gatekeepers in the first place. The countermeasures to privacy-violating apps should be technical, not organizational. Sandbox all apps, don't give them anything that could be used to uniquely identify the user across apps. Require user consent for everything potentially sensitive, including internet access. Give the user the ability to grant fake permissions to apps — for example, a fake location permission where the system says "yes it's granted" but never returns any location data, "searching" for GPS indefinitely.
Before Android had finer-grained permissions[0], I used Xposed, a framework that allowed deep modifications to the OS and apps, and a permissions management tool called Xprivacy. It provided the kind of features you're describing, including fake locations that apps could not detect. Yes, Facebook, you can access my location. I'm in Pyongyang, North Korea.
Successors to Xposed and Xprivacy exist, but I have not used them. It may be time to revisit that.
[0] Many people, including me are still not satisfied with Android's permissions.
It is very important to have good privacy defaults, because most users don’t change any settings, so then, those who do change them are easier to fingerprint, partially defeating the purpose.
