On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:11:04AM -0800, Benjamin Kerensa wrote: > I want to encourage the Fedora Community to think carefully about > making a switch to another browser as the default in Fedora. I would > not get hung up on these tiles (Ads) too much and remember they are > necessary in order for Mozilla to continue building Firefox, > Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Firefox OS and supporting the very literally > hundreds of movements and thousands of events it does each year. Hi Benjamin. This seems like as good a place as any to jump in on this topic. I think that there are three separate concerns here: 1. Privacy and Tracking ======================= This is a big concern of many of our contributors and users, and it's something that we don't have a clear policy on. I've seen some degree of speculation over Mozilla's practices here; people should read <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tiles/Data_Collection>, which will hopefully clear up some of the concerns. (I'm unsure, though, of the significance of "tile ID and destination" vs "URL" from a user point of view. Also, use of the jargon word "frecency" does not help clarity.) On the one hand, though, we live in a world of the Web. _Especially_ for a web browser, I do not see much difference between the "enhanced" new tab page, which happens to be local with remote content, and having that page be <https://start.mozilla.org/>, which runs Google Analytics and Optimizely beacons and could presumably start running advertising at any time. On the other hand, I do not like the idea of Fedora having a jumble of privacy options one must track down and opt out of in various applications. This doesn't seem in line with our vision statement, which includes "people control their content and devices". Mozilla seems to have thought this through considerably and the practices seem much better than _most_, but I'm not sure we want to get Fedora into the business of reviewing and approving these for every case. 2. Implication of Endorsement of Fedora or by Fedora =================================================== When someone downloads Firefox independently from the operating system, and discovers that it is ad-supported software, the relationship is fairly clear. However, Firefox is, as you note, our default and centerpiece web browser. Although Firefox obviously has a strong brand of its own, the details of the relationship isn't necessarily clear. A reasonable person could see the tiles marked "sponsored" and assume that Fedora is involved in the sponsorhip relationship in some way — that we endorse the links, products, or services; or that we are receiving some amount of funding from them. This is particularly problematic for a project like Fedora, where our mission has a significant component of cultural impact. We don't want to be seen as endorsing viewpoints which do not align with our foundations. (And yes, this is also a potential problem with the various links to websites contained in GNOME Software appstream from <https://github.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/tree/master/appstream-extra>.) 3. Dislike of Advertising in General ==================================== When a company's source of revenue is advertising, its users inevitably become its _product_, rather than the people the company serves. I appreciate that Mozilla is making these moves in order to reduce dependency on a company where advertising and tracking _is_ the primary income stream. It's a complicated issue and I know Mozilla has struggled with it and will continue to. I guess I don't have much more to say about this aspect except: there it is, and that it is separate from the other two. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
