With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
Exactly this. Most people care about convenience above all else. People want their software to “just work” without having to fiddle with settings or add-ons or anything else.
but your average person owns an Alexa
The average person owns a smartphone. I cannot fathom how anyone thinks a device that sits in one place is a bigger threat than one with greater capabilities that you carry with you all the time.
I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It’s just that they don’t always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there’s virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we’d never tolerate in real life.
If you could visually see every time there’s a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we’d be in a better position.
There’s no way we’d tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.
It’s usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn’t as “visual” and as “graphic” as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.
I am one of those people. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in the decades I’ve been putting my info online beyond a bad actor getting ahold of my credit card info for a minute. I just don’t see the issue when companies with my data actively make my life better…?
It could happen to you, but it has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen to other people. And you enable it happening to other people by participating in it.
Here’s another where the police used Facebook messages to target a woman getting an abortion
Just take one look at China to see the kind of dystopian future we’re heading toward. Look up Zhima credit. Look up what happens to protestors.
The short version is, your government can easily turn fascist at a moment’s notice, and when it does there’s no way to claw back all that data you put out there.
I don’t give a single shit about what Google or Facebook has on me, other than the fact that they give a backdoor to that data to every government body that asks.
That video was nuts. I hope they win that case. It’s ridiculous.
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
It does, actually. Just indirectly. Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google.
Well, that could mean that Chrome cares more about securely protecting the data because it’s important to their income.
In much the same way that a bank robber securely protects the bag of money he stole.
Firefox’s sole income stream comes from them leading you into google search.
Well that’s blatantly untrue. Or if it is true, it must certainly come as a shock to the Mozilla Foundation.
Well, the last time I’ve looked into their financials it looked something like this(numbers are not precise, Im talking from memory, no way im diving in it again): The mozilla corpiration, which is a for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation, earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million dollars, with overwhelming majority of it coming from google, rest from yandex and baidu. They’ve spent most of it on firefox devs salaries and moved 13ish million to mozilla foundation, the NPO. The Mozilla Foundation itself earned somewhere around 13 mil, too, with about a mil coming from direct donations, rest from grants. They’ve spent it on evangelistic purposes, like on events in fuck knows where, stuff not directly related to firefox(vpn, vr stuff), grants to other projects (like rust), but mostly into managements pockets. None of that goes to firefox the browser.
As you can see, Mozilla is completely at a mercy of Google, especially after the deal with yandex fell through due to sactions. Otherwise, they don’t have nearly enough resources to keep up as is, nevermind losing 95% of revenue. There is a glimmer of hope for them pivoting into mozilla ecosystem, like with VPN and password manager, but I havent heard about those in a while, and the competetion is stiff there, but Im keeping my hopes up.
That is undeniably important information, and I give you credit for supplying it. However, it should be noted that Firefox is entirely open source, and if the browser stepped out of line with the stated ethos of the foundation, it would immediately be noted most vociferously.
You can easily change that setting and it’s one of the first most basic things I do with a new browser.
mozilla gotta eat somehow
Using firefox exclusively on all my devices since the last major revamp of the Firefox Android.
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
- Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
- Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
- Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Even if you deleted it or didn’t hit enter.
This is the problem! :( Monopoly is never good, in this case in particular since it’s in the hand of a corporation they make money on people data.
