On 6/9/15 3:19 PM, Mike Connor wrote:
On 9 June 2015 at 07:04, Dan Stillman <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The Pocket integration seems almost purposely designed to blur the
distinction between Mozilla and Pocket. (As Pocket's CEO put it,
"With the exception of search, it’s rare for companies to be
integrated this deeply into the browser." [1])
At least to some extent, that's true of any good integration of a
third party service. It's certainly true for search as well. Painting
something as foreign and possibly scary would be directly counter to
the goal of helping users make use of a valuable feature/service. If
we don't think it's something we can recommend/promote to our users,
we simply shouldn't include it. Same goes for if we don't believe our
users can or should trust a partner.
With search you can switch to DuckDuckGo with a couple clicks. With
Share you choose from many different services. Pocket is integrated as a
sole provider for a core feature.
The issue for me is the combination of the privileged integration with
how different it is from Firefox's own bookmarks architecture a few
icons over. If Mozilla hadn't previously deemed user bookmark data so
sensitive that it merited client-side encryption, this wouldn't strike
me as so odd.
And it's not a matter of trust. Again, Pocket seems like a great
company. But sensitive user data is being sent, and Mozilla and users
have no control over what's done with it, now or in the future.
I know there are people out there who don't want to use any
website
whose code is closed source
I think this is a red herring, or at least isn't even vaguely the
issue for me. A website's being open source doesn't have any
bearing on its having access to people's private data. Mozilla
software is open source and Mozilla is a widely trusted
organization, but even Mozilla chose not to collect people's
private bookmark data when it designed its sync system.
It's clearly not the issue if you're using Gmail, indeed! It's a
tradeoff, and we believe that for the significant majority of users
this is an acceptable one.
I think the significant majority of users don't think about where their
data is going, which is why it's up to privacy-focused organizations
like Mozilla to do it for them. We should at at least acknowledge that
Mozilla's position on what is acceptable with regard to users' data has
changed dramatically from when Firefox Sync was designed. I imagine
there were third-party, unencrypted bookmark sync providers that Mozilla
could have partnered with to speed development of Firefox Sync, offer
more features, and avoid having to maintain a sync architecture. For
that matter, I imagine an unencrypted version of Firefox Sync that was
still run by Mozilla would have been significantly easier to develop,
but that's not what Mozilla chose to do.
In creating any feature, Mozilla has to choose between
partnering to get
it, or building it ourselves. And we can't build _everything_.
Mozilla can't build everything, but it clearly can build
bookmark-syncing services, and it can build them in a way that
protects people's privacy. To roll out a very similar feature in
prime toolbar space that treats that same data in such a different
manner from the existing functionality strikes me as a bizarre and
worrying choice.
The question to ask is not whether we can build it, but whether we can
build it as well and as quickly, and what we would be giving up if we
committed to competing with the existing services. Pocket's a market
leader in this space, and focused entirely on this space. Playing
catch-up, and investing enough in development to match their user
value proposition (especially their mobile coverage) would be
prohibitively expensive.
I think this is a false dichotomy. A version of this that piggybacked on
Firefox Sync, with its inherent data protections, wouldn't need to — and
couldn't, by definition — offer all of the features of Pocket. But it
would maintain Mozilla's position of protecting bookmark data by default
instead of shrugging and shipping that data off to a third-party company
without public discussion.
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