----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Kelly" <[email protected]> To: "Sheeri Cabral" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], "Benjamin Kerensa" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 9:08:09 AM Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke
I don't assume this wasn't thought through (after an initial period of "What?! Ads on newtab? Whaargrbl!", but that speaks to my lack of vocabulary more than anything), but I am bothered by the fact that I can't find any more info about this outside of the blog post. Thus, I'm in the position that a) A feature that, at first glance, sounds contrary to Mozilla's values, has been announced, and b) The only official info on this feature is a tweet from an employee and a badly-worded blog post. ------------------ And if you read the blog post, you'd see that it's only for the "new tab" page, and only for people who don't have a browsing history (so, new people and people who don't save history or clear it often). Here's a thought experiment - without looking, what's on your new tab page? Do you even know? (I only knew 2 of the tiles from actual remembering, I don't know if most people know more or fewer than that) It's unobtrusive, doesn't degrade any actual web page, and goes away once some history builds up. Selling ads is not contrary to Mozilla's values, any more than selling t-shirts is contrary to Mozilla's values...think about what you are concerned about, what is *actually* contrary to Mozilla's values, and really ask yourself if you believe that Mozilla selling ads would do that. Would Mozilla invade privacy to sell ads? Would Mozilla money to do its mission, by directly opposing the mission? After 15 years of arguing for the rights and privacy of the user, is there not *any* trust? What if the ads were for organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and the Knight Foundation, or for projects like Webmaker, or for a Firefox OS Phone from Telefonica? I can think of TONS of ads that would *promote* Mozilla's mission in addition to being a source of revenue*. Maybe we can all use the energy around this discussion to come up with lots of great mission-promoting ads, instead of making slippery slope arguments. -Sheeri * and yes, I can also think of tons of ads that would promote companies directly against Mozilla's values, offend people, be unsightly, etc. but I also know that Mozillians are smart and want to do the right thing. Mozilla controls a web browser, and I can think of a ton of features we could program that would violate privacy - for one, let's intercept and keep a copy of every file uploaded through the browser! Just because we have a web browser and *could potentially* program that in, that does not mean we should be all up in arms about what we *could* do. Ads *could* do bad things, but I'm not immediately jumping to the conclusion that Mozilla's ads *will*. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
