I suspect that vetting this kind of partnership needs someone who is ferociously knowledgeable, principled, and skeptical. Not someone who's mainly looking at it from a business development or career angle.
Now the aftermath could use a fighter, looking for how they could legally disassemble the entire racket. Not only because it's arguably on-mission, but more importantly because Mozilla has a reputation to redeem on this now.
(For example, no matter how that party has squeaked by wrt consumers, maybe there's a new angle in their dealings with Mozilla, such as a different kind of fraud. And Mozilla is much more able to pursue the matter than most individuals would be.)
This. If they can go after the guy for fraudulent misrepresentation or something, I'd be on the sidelines cheering every jab, maybe contributing if there's a legal "attack the stalker companies" fund.
Building a browser is harder than posting puff pieces about privacy. Mozilla has sadly strayed away from being a browser company into being some PR company that happens to make minor changes to a browser once in a blue moon.
Agreed, a lot of the behavior looks like that. But if we ask why we want them to build a browser, would you agree that privacy+security+freedom+democracy online are the main reasons we have?
If so, then would you say much of their current messaging has the right idea?
Would you also say that we've seen genuine progress (and also regression resistance) in that direction with the browser?
Personally, I'd say yes to all those. Two things that I don't understand are what one executive was getting paid, and some of their decisions during that executive's tenure, for a long time.
One guess is that some people were letting it be run like a tech company, and furthermore a tech company coasting along in some ways without being very effective. And that would have to be multiple people, since everyone answers to someone. If that guess were accurate, then not only do you have to ask the watchers why that was allowed to happen, and figure out how to fix that, but you also have to look for cascading effects within the organization from that having gone on.
Mozilla has gone all-in on talk (or "messaging") and but very little action. In some cases I would say they are actually giving people a false sense of security because despite all the claims, Firefox in its default configuration isn't actually great privacy-wise (for starters, default-on telemetry is in direct breach of the GDPR).
Mozilla could massively help non-technical people regain privacy by shipping Firefox with actually private defaults and uBlock Origin built-in (they've got the infrastructure to download Pocket on first run, so they can do the same for uBlock), but doing would actually mean "doing something" and put them at risk (I'd expect the Google money to stop the second this is released, meaning they'd need to actually start operating a real business with a real business model), where as merely writing puff pieces is safe as it doesn't really hurt anyone.
I like this comment, and I'll pitch in my two cents on it.
Suppose Joe Salesman sells your friend Al a used car and it turns out they got a bad deal, the car was a lemon. What lesson should be learned from this?
a) This was an honest mistake. We expect this kind of variance in used vehicles, and the market works out kinks. I should feel comfortable buying a used car from Joe, should the need arise.
b) The information that this car was a lemon was available to Joe, who did not share it with Al because Joe thought Al was a sucker. I am better at diagnosing cars than Al, (or better at reading people), and I should feel wary about buying cars from Joe.
c) Joe only sells lemons, his business model is to rip people off, and there's no way to get a good deal on a used car from Joe. I should look elsewhere to buy a car.
d) This describes the business model of all used car salesmen, I should not buy a used car from a business that sells used cars.
e) This describes all business models when there is information symmetry between buyer and seller. I should not buy anything whose utility I cannot bound from below. (I need a warranty or similar arrangement from the seller).
There are obviously other options here, this is just to illustrate the spectrum of assumed adversariality. There was an article on HN recently declaring that salesman were more likely to get ripped off. I think this is because salesmen tend to think the answer to this question is (b) because salesmen exclusively interact with people who think that the answer is either (a),(b), or (c).
It's not just salesmen, actually. I think the phenomenon is equally well represented in people with business degrees. The core belief of an MBA is that you can subvert the regulatory structure, and people's psychology, to get them to give you more money for the thing than it costs you to make the thing. That's after all, where MBA income comes from. I think this comes much more naturally to people who think that the answer to the question above is (b).
I think by and large, whenever you hear that their company decided to purchase anything at all (but particular some sort of service), your instinct is that the purchaser was a gullible idiot, and that things would obviously work much better if no one was allowed to buy anything.
Personally, I do not think that ferocious skepticism is necessary to solve this problem. I think that it is much more cheaply and easily solved by having a moratorium on buying shit. Mozilla does not, EVER, need to be a customer.
Does Mozilla still need to be the seller or partner in deals with commercial entities (e.g., Mozilla getting paid to be the default search engine or LLM within the browser UI)?
If so, would ferocious skepticism within Mozilla be appropriate in vetting and monitoring those deals?
Now the aftermath could use a fighter, looking for how they could legally disassemble the entire racket. Not only because it's arguably on-mission, but more importantly because Mozilla has a reputation to redeem on this now.
(For example, no matter how that party has squeaked by wrt consumers, maybe there's a new angle in their dealings with Mozilla, such as a different kind of fraud. And Mozilla is much more able to pursue the matter than most individuals would be.)