- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.ml
mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.ml
I got a copy of the text from the email, and added it below, with personal information and link trackers removed.
Hello [receiver’s name],
I’ve long dreamed about working for Mozilla. I learned how to send encrypted e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ve been a Firefox user since almost as long as I can remember. In more recent years, I’ve been an avid follower of Mozilla’s advocacy work, and was lucky enough to partner with Mozilla on investigative journalism in my last job.
In many ways, Mozilla was the dream – and now, as the leader of the Foundation, my job is to make my dreams for Mozilla come true. What that means, though, is making your dreams come true – for a trustworthy and open future of technology; for tech that is a tool for liberation, not limitation; and for tech that values people over profit.
So I’m reaching out to technologists, activists, researchers, engineers, policy experts, and, most importantly, to you – the people who make up the Mozilla community – to ask a simple question.
[receiver’s name]. What is your dream for Mozilla? I invite you to take a moment to share your thoughts by completing this brief survey.
Let’s start with this question:
Question 1: What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
- Protecting my privacy online
- Avoiding scams
- Choosing products, apps, technology, and services that I can trust
- Keeping children safe online
- Responsible use of AI
- Keeping the internet is open and free
- Knowing how to spot misinformation
- Other (please specify)
With your help, together we can imagine and create the Internet we want. Thank you for being a part of this.
Always yours,
Nabiha Syed Executive Director Mozilla Foundation
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This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don’t make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.
Make and maintain the best browser. The end.
The questionnaire is about AI, race and so any genders. That’s all you need to know about their focus.
Stick a fork in them. They’re done.
I responded that I’d like them to build out Firefox to be a credible alternative to chrome (I personally think it is, but market share thinks otherwise).
My dream for Mozilla is that it does not descend into a capitalist marionette full of silent information gathering and black-box AI widgets. If you’re going to do AI, I want it open, like training data open. Whitepaper open. I want to be able to trust the company and it’s projects and especially it’s browser.
Realistically, firefox will monetize advertising. But as long as they remain true to open source, we will have the forks to strip out the nasty bits. The normies will get less violated than elsewhere and people in the know will still have the dream browser.
This 500 million per year pay cut is going to hurt no matter what.
I asked them to support JPEGXL by default.
So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?
I guess I’m not totally convinced that this is an official Mozilla survey, or even if it is - I’m not sure who their target survey audience is.
So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?
The email was through their newsletter and I would have offered to forward it, if it didn’t have personal information in it. Maybe someone else who is subscribed to the newsletter can back up the claim instead?
I actually searched for the website link to put in the post body before sharing, and went through a similar thought process as yours when I didn’t find it. My reasons for sharing it anyway were:
- Sometimes these emails say to not share it further, but this one didn’t
- I see it shared already in a few places unofficially (Mastodon, Reddit, Twitter)
- It mentioned ‘Mozilla Community’ and not a more specific group, so this audience seemed appropriate
- People here might have better feedback than I could write up, so it should be a net positive for Mozilla
It would be nice if they did post about it on an official account to resolve any concerns. If it helps, it looks like “mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net” has been used for other surveys in the past and so you might find a link to that domain from an official source
edit:
their website has links to that domain based on a search of the GitHub repo
For example, the ‘Submit a product here’ link on this page: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/
It’s also possible to submit without filling in the demographic questions if people are concerned but still want to submit
Fair enough. Thanks for the additional context.
As an unrelated point, when I searched again just now, most of the entries in the search engine were from Lemmy/Mbin, followed by Mastodon. Mostly this post and others like it
Embrace RFC 8890 (“The Internet is for End Users”) as a guiding principle for all Mozilla client app design and for the organization as a whole:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8890.html
Specifically, delete item 9 from the Mozilla manifesto and replace it with “follow RFC 8890”. That’s not supposed to be an anti-business stance, but rather, a recognition that the commercial side of the internet has the resources to look after its own interests, and Mozilla should be on the user side, rather than trying to straddle both sides.
Besides the already sketchy AI thing, I wonder why they need to know gender & ethnicity.
There’s nothing sketchy about their AI implementation.
Private, locally-run, offline language translation that doesn’t send data to Google translation servers is a good thing. I don’t see how that’s sketchy.
Or their alt-text generation for images to assist blind people in using the web. I don’t see how that’s sketchy at all.
Because that’s a typical demographics question for any survey worth it’s salt?
My dream: mozilla.exe . Too bad it takes SeaMonkey to do mozilla better than Mozilla.
I want nothing to do with AI, everything is like “I want transparency” I dont want them involved at all, pissing away money buzz words.
What do you want from mozilla? an open source privacy focused browser.
An engine component separable from the UI (which was XUL and thus Firefox initial advantage that gave it popularity), deeply extensible via plugins, tunable (it would be so frigging cool to be able to turn off sections of).
What it was needed for when it was popular.
Not a Chrome alternative with a different engine.
Somehow every time I mention XUL and XULRunner people mention that one can use PaleMoon or that XUL is incompatible with some security and stability changes and so on.
I know that. I don’t mean literally XUL, I mean low-level access to the engine. Allowing it to be used for things like old Conkeror and such, or just customizing Firefox as deeply as it was possible in olden days.
But their AI helps protect privacy? The main thing it’s currently used for is offline private translation that doesn’t send data to Google’s servers.
The other main AI feature they’re working on is AI-generated alt-text for untagged images, so that blind people can better use the web.
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
I feel like you’re doing the classic Lemmy/Reddit thing of seeing the letters “AI” and automatically freaking out, before looking into what they’re actually doing. We aren’t talking about ChatGPT integration here…
They asked and we think they shouldn’t waste money on it and everything they do should be optional and not bundled by default. Why do you think we didn’t understand?
People have been asking for translation in Firefox for years, they add it in a way that works well and is completely private, and people cry about it.
It IS optional and it ISN’T bundled by default.
I don’t think privacy or usability for blind people is a waste.
Sure, those two are ok, I guess, so long as Firefox doesn’t download models before I try using them for the first time. However, I emphatically don’t want and wouldn’t use and would be miffed if any tl;dring AI plugins weren’t optional. Mind you, we’re only here discussing this because we were asked about it and now there’s people replying as if ours are ludicrously luddite opinions that stand in the way of progress and Mozilla’s success.
If everything is an optional component the onboarding process might get pretty overwhelming for the average user
Well, la di fucking dah. You’re telling me they have to bundle the solution to make people realize they have problems that fit. I’d just like a lean browser that understands Ublock Origin is its primary concern and focus because it’s its main advantage at the moment. Bundle that if you’re in a bundling mood.
You’re free to send your data to google or deepl instead of using Firefox’s included AI translate. You know, privacy, no AI in the browser, choose one.
This is concerning but I couldn’t find anything informing it fetches from Google, in fact it says it does not rely in any Cloud at all either. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/ and https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/ Maybe I am wrong, could you point me where did you find out about it?
No, it isn’t. It’s integrated into the browser, and running locally.
I’m just saying that if you a) want translation and b) privacy then you want c) AI in firefox. Because, you know, translation models are AI tech, figures that natural language is too fuzzy to do in other ways.
Oh, I misinterpreted what you said, I understood it the other way around, my bad. Their page about the translation tool does say it runs locally though so it’s a good thing, isn’t it? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/
Yes it’s a good thing and it’s more locally-running stuff that they’re investigating. Things like fuzzy search on your history, tl;dr bot, etc.
Malware site detection would be another idea, though they of course already have a non-local solution for that. Maybe, we do have to come full circle after all don’t we, a model that can give you an estimation of how likely it is that the page you’re looking at is AI slop.
I filled it, but there’s no avenue there to express my complete disdain for AI and how shit it can make a product. Just make everything AI optional, don’t make me download data for shit I’ll never use.
It’s opt-in already, in fact you have to go out of your way to do it. And it’s currently only used for offline, private language translation, to my knowledge.
That is a very good usecase considering the alternative is to send it to a Google translation server.
I feel like people need to actually read beyond the “Mozilla adds AI to Firefox” headlines.
Of all the things you could want from Firefox. Of all the possibilities.
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
This is why we can’t have nice things…
The primary, only, thing you could come up with is “I don’t want privacy focused translation, because AI”
Also this one is really tenuous to the point I’ll say fuck your interpretations of what I wrote. It should be: I don’t want ANY translation to inflate the browser. Publish them as a separate exe or a Firefox plugin. They bundle it because it’s a bunch of shit most people don’t need and would never seek /download.
Without realizing the the grand majority of all translation tools that don’t suck have been AI driven for like 8+ years (Long, long, before LLMs of today).
That’s presumptuous, I’m perfectly aware of it, but I’m not downloading the grand majority of translation tools with my browser.
I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn’t leverage AI. Mozilla’s resources are better spent improving the web.
good set of questions while trying to be non biased on certain topics.
for me, topics about privacy and misinformation matter more than ai. i would like them to lean more on helping me identify ai generated text and deepfakes as far as ai is concerned.
i also liked that mozilla study about smart cars so more of that is nice.
gecko webview for android, better site isolation
You can submit the survey without checking any of the boxes on the AI question, just FYI.
