This is a follow-up post on the sad state of Mozilla
First, notice the date of the commit identified (as highlighted in a few posts below this one).
Secondly, Mozilla has done further changes to their Privacy policy since this initial change. I am not fully convinced about them - since the Privacy FAQ at the same time is not aligned. The reason for my continued mistrust to Mozilla is that they have gradually, over many years, moved in a direction I do find privacy unfriendly. And they have ties/agreements/contracts/partnerships to companies who does not have a good track record on privacy topics. I generally trust people and organisations actions more than their words of what they want to do.
Thirdly, it should be fairly clear to most that AI/LLM is not preserving privacy well when data is sent to a remote server to be processed there. And even running parts of the LLM engines locally does not fully disentangle the privacy aspects fully - data is still being exchanged with a remote server (otherwise there would not need to be "AI service provider URLs" in about:cofig). Mozilla did force AI/LLM unto users, enabled by default with the only way to disable that in the beginning via about:config. And it took several releases before more user friendly approaches to disable it arrived. Due to this delay, I really wonder "does these new knobs really fully disable AI/LLM?". I have that doubt, because of how Mozilla has behaved over many years.
On top of this, the Mozilla leadership is extremely well paid while they have reduced their engineering teams working on Firefox and other products. That is a too strong indication for me to ignore, that profit and leadership compensation seem to be way more important than the core mission of making Internet a better place.
I have little trust in Mozilla for the time being. And I doubt I'm alone, due to the traction this toot thread triggered. Currently, I believe trust can be built up again. But it will take a lot of efforts now to repair what has been broken. For that to improve for me, I will need to see a lot of actions from Mozilla, where they clearly does changes in the whole organisation and communicates them clearly and that the communication is aligned across all aspescts - including policy documents, FAQs, source code. Until that happens, I will use some of the Firefox forks. And leadership compensation need to be completely transparent and come down to a level which is not in an astronomic level comparable to large for-profit enterprise companies who generally cares little for anything than their own egoistic wealth.
If a person taking a leadership role in an organisation claiming for a better Internet and fighting for its users is getting uninteresting unless there is a million dollar yearly compensation when the people doing the grunt work, delivering code resulting in a real product, has a 5th or 10th of that compensation, then I do question the values this person holds. And I will especially highly question the leadership when they need to reduce cost and choses to cut among the engineers doing the grunt work while the leadership not considering their own compensation.
So basically, I find the Mozilla organisation fairly rotten currently. It preaches the nice words but ends up doing something completely different.