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Comment by arctux | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of why Firefox is so important. Mozilla's incentives, unlike those of companies making significant revenue from tracking-based advertising, align with the user. Google, for example, could have implemented Chrome's sync feature in a privacy preserving manner, but instead chose to use it as a method to collect their users' complete browsing histories.

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If that's the case why Firefox Accounts is not really designed with the end-user in mind? The design totally looks like a nice walled garden, completely custom and non-interoperable.

Just a few quick examples:

1. There's HAWK and OAuth2 and BrowserID there, all in the same system. That's a lot of undesirable extra complexity.

2. The Sync 1.5 protocol itself is full of non-standard weirdness, with odd stuff like X-Last-Modified (which is just like Last-Modified but with UNIX timestamp - seriously?). While I haven't experimented writing an adapter yet, I strongly suspect a plain old' WebDAV (with a tiny little bit of sub-standard collection stuff) would've worked just fine and even better.

3. Poor documentation. The documentation was draft quality when Accounts and Sync were just rolled out (so it required some reverse engineering), but that's understandable. Things have improved since then but I believe a lot of stuff isn't really fully documented even today. For example, some undocumented magic is required to show Accounts sign-in page on iOS.

My point is, the whole thing is absolutely not developer-friendly (unless you're a Mozilla developer), as it makes self-hosting and alternate implementations quite difficult.

Maybe my problem is Accounts and Sync is not a standard (neither a proposal to become one), but just a documented vendor-unique API.

Keep in mind Weave was designed as the alternative to using LDAP for storing such information. The first browser supporting Firefox Sync (Weave) was Fennec on Nokia N8x0/N900. We're talking about 2008 or so here. LDAP is no longer used for this purpose, and the other alternative is proprietary and stores your data at a third party for data mining (Google Chrome).

End-user or developer? I believe it’s plenty friendly to end-users since it’s simple to use and works. However, it’s certainly not so for developers, as I’ve struggled myself at self-hosting Firefox Accounts/Sync.

Both. Developers are end-users as well, and an ability to self-host (and protocol standardization and availability of alternate implementations) matters to non-developer end-users too, even though they don't ask for it.

Openness is in the same boah as privacy. Average user would buy just a "we pinky swear it respect your privacy" sticker on the product, but we know they want real privacy. Same with openness. And Firefox Account & friends is not an open system, it just happens to be partially documented and have a few FLOSS implementations of varying quality.

Kinto is a step in the right direction, though.

Doesn't chrome lets you use your own encryption key?

It already encrypts sync data with your G username/password, but you can choose to change it in settings. Chrome 69 or 70 made it even easier to change it right from the settings.

Yes, but it's not the default. From the article:

> One could, however, add a second passphrase that is never sent to the server, and encrypt the data using that. Chrome provides this as a non-default option.

The average user doesn't have the expertise to know that they have to configure an additional "master password" to keep Google from mining their data for ads.

That is true, defaults are important. Firefox users know that because they have to disable the advertisements that appear in the Firefox new tab page by default.

https://prod-cdn.sumo.mozilla.net/uploads/gallery/images/201...

I strongly dislike that they've done that. In their partial defense, the selection of recommended articles based on your browsing history is done on device.

In fact this was one of the primary motivations behind Sponsored Tiles in Firefox, to prove the viability of a privacy-preserving monetization model for the web.

It's interesting that while some could certainly characterize all of that screenshot's "Recommended by Pocket" stories as advertisements, recently they've started showing actual Sponsored Stories advertisements in that spot as well.

I'm downvoting this as the same off-topic whataboutism that comes up any time this topic is discussed on HN (and the fact that you felt the need to create a throwaway account to post it makes me think you knew what you were doing here).

I'm not sure account age is so relevant. I create new accounts all the time (several times per month) even though I stand behind what I write. It takes 15 seconds so hardly a big effort. I've noticed that it's possible to extract a lot of info from people's posts, in many cases deanonymizing them if you go through enough history and correlate with other sites. Maybe he is a bit privacy concerned.

>keep Google from mining their data for ads

I just got this morbid idea of Google mining storing passwords to recommend LastPass/1Password in ads based on your password strength.

Hmm I wonder if LastPass/1Password advertises on websites listed on haveibeenpwned

1Password is promoted by the HIBP itself, a.k.a Troy Hunt. I would not use it.

Yes, but that leaves you with 2 passwords and isn't default.

The advantage here is twofold. - Your encryption key is derived from your single Firefox password, rather than having 2 passwords. - The ease of use of this system makes it possible to have e2e encryption by default rather than by opt-in.

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