On 12/9/13 7:32 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 04/12/13 08:06, Li Gong wrote:
It may sound logical but to state this in an absolutely way is
totally naive. We never do things in complete isolation. We have been
forced to do untold number of things because actions on the part of
others. If your opponents fight dirty, sometimes you have to fight
back dirty. Of course you can choose to stay high moral and clean and
healthy and play hero all you want, but the day you cease to exist,
you no longer matter. There is a delicate balance here, and that is
still being found out.
If there are companies out there modifying Firefox links to include
affiliate identifiers to that they get extra money, how does it hinder
or stop them for us to engage in the same behaviour?
If we engage in this behaviour, it seems like this is less "fighting
back dirty" and more "joining in on the opposition's side".
As for the policy questions, I will leave it other forum members to
comment.
I would have no problem whatsoever with Mozilla issuing a statement
which says: "We will never insert affiliate or tracking IDs into a
user's links or bookmarks without their explicit consent." I can't think
of a situation where that would ever be justified.
Gerv
One aspect of the situation that's unclear to me is if the bookmark link
we're talking about is actually our addition to the default bookmarks.
From the context, I think it might very well be.
If it was, I think it'd be fine for us to track its performance, with
explicit flags.
Given that you can't edit links from the default bookmarks after profile
creation, I can see why it's tempting to do so after the fact.
PS: There's some overlap between this and the mistakes we did back in
2004 with tracking the performance of the eBay plugin in the German
version. It'd obviously be great if we don't need to learn that lesson
every 10 years, but I can also relate to how easy it is to fall into a
trap like this.
Axel
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