• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2021

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  • We will have to watch closely how Mozilla implements these standardized consent dialogs, because this could be a devious way of obfuscating from the user whether the app uses their data in acceptable or unacceptable ways. I wouldn’t put anything past the new surveillance capitalism friendly Mozilla Corp.

    The article doesn’t link to the source, which is this post:

    https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2025/04/03/rethinking-extension-data-consent-clarity-consistency-and-control/

    Today, our Add-on policies dictate that any extension that collects or transmits user data must create and display a data consent dialog. This consent dialog must clearly state what type of data is being collected and inform the user about the impact of accepting or declining the data collection.

    Whilst the policy is a great example of Firefox’s commitment to transparency and protecting user data, it can add significant overhead for developers who want to build on our platform, and it creates a confusing experience for end users who often encounter many different data consent experiences for every extension they install. These custom data consent experiences also increase the time it takes for add-on reviewers to process a new extension version, as they need to verify this custom code is compliant with our policies. We’re simplifying how extensions gets consent to collect data

    In 2025 we will launch a new data consent experience for extensions, built into the Firefox add-on installation flow itself. This will dramatically reduce the:

    • development effort required to be compliant with Firefox data policies
    • confusion users faces when installing extensions by providing a more consistent experience, giving them more confidence and control around the data collected or transmitted
    • effort it takes AMO reviewers to evaluate an extension version to ensure it’s compliant with our data collection policies

    Developers won’t need to bother with creating their own custom data consent experiences. Soon, developers will simply be able to specify in the manifest what types of data the extension collects/transmits and this will automatically be reflected in a unified consent experience across all Firefox extensions.


  • The DHT exists and is already a fully distributed system.

    Even without the DHT, there is no centralization in Bittorrent that would lend itself to federation. Anyone with a complete copy of the data can already start their own tracker.

    Do you perhaps mean a federated content index that links to torrents or magnet URIs?










  • I personally know of two different banks who send a notification to your phone app to verify that it’s you they are speaking with on the phone, and they will do this even when it’s them that called you and not the other way around.

    It’s security theater as it doesn’t prove anything to either party (as it’s trivial for scammers to have a man-in-the-middle) but they still do it.