[conspire] no privacy

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> One a related matter, Firefox is now suggesting creating an account
> with them.  Any thoughts?

My thought is that, when a corporation like Mozilla Corporation[1] says
'Store your tab links, browser history, passwords, bookmarks, cached
copies of articles, and notes with us, and we'll make them available to
all your devices', my reaction is that I have no reason to want that,
that I have a large number of reasons to not want it, and that if they
released open source code for doing such things on my own self-hosted
computing resources, I'd at least consider running a code instance, but
probably wouldn't because I have no use-case requiring that.

The natural audience for a Firefox Account is the hordes of people who
are heavily dependent on smartphones, and are already habituated to
outsourcing everything they do to strangers, i.e., to 'the Cloud', with
zero concern for security or privacy (and who cannot even spell
'computing autonomy').


[1] They would doubtless object that Firefox Cloud Services is actually
an effort from Mozilla Foundation, which in turn is a non-profit
appendage of Mozilla Corporation.  There are certainly far, far, worse
people to outsource your passwords and browser metadata to, and I have
fond regard and admiration for the Mozilla folks, but personally I'd
prefer that my stuff remain my stuff.  I'd rather swim than sync.  ;->