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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

> The form includes significant loopholes, like failing to require the apps to report data sharing with “service providers.”

> As we’ve noted, data sharing with “service providers” is exempt from disclosure requirements.

> Many different companies act as service providers, including Google itself

Well, whaddya know. Apps don't have to report whether they share data with Google.

I found it striking that in the list of four questions that Mozilla asked Google, not one of them elicited a straight answer. I don't mean just evasive or slippery; they failed to answer the question, instead answering a different question, one that wasn't asked.

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The fairly clearly implied answers:

A1: we never review the disclosures. We have reviewed zero apps for discrepancies in the last year.

A2: since we never check (refer to A1), it can get as bad as it likes, and would you please be quiet because we’re trying to remain wilfully ignorant over here!

A3: we have taken zero enforcement actions in the last year (surely you understood that from our first answer?).

A4: ARGH! WHY ARE YOU TELLING US ABOUT PROBLEMS? WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW OR WE MIGHT HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Y’know. Something.

they failed to answer the question, instead answering a different question, one that wasn't asked.

Politicians do this all the time. Constantly. They do it because the PR firms taught them to do this, and those same PR people work for tech companies now.

(It's awful that journalists these days let politicians get away with it. When I went to journalism school, we would get a failing grade if we allowed an interview subject to dodge a question like that, but that's a rant for another day.)

There's a funny passage in one of Al Franken's books about this. Franken was a comedian who ran for the U.S. Senate and was successfully elected. (He later escaped in celestial disgrace, but that's unrelated.) He talks about how he was trained to do this by his PR folks, thought it was stupid, tried it out in a few interviews to get them off his back, and then was amazed that it worked every time.

The documentary "Thank You For Smoking" illustrates this.

There was a funny video just about this not that long ago regarding housing prices in canda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ExYQ21sGY

The sad part is, that the politician asking the question does a better job that most journalists and points at the absurdity of the dodged answers.

Yet it’s all still deeply impersonal. I would have thought it would be much more effective for the one whose questions are being rudely ignored to deliberately make it personal in response: to bluntly impugn the honour and integrity of the other, politely offering grave insult to match the insult received by the ignoring of the question—the sort of thing that would probably have led to a duel in bygone ages. (I wonder if such bodies have any specific rules against referring to someone as “the dishonourable minister” or similar, or anything about means of address in general.)

Mozilla itself is no stranger to weasely language in some privacy-related aspects.

That, or they do fun stuff like giving this splash screen on a new update:

https://imgur.com/a/p4CVBHb "Power and privacy to the people. No need to dig into your security settings. Fierce privacy is our default."

You know, the browser that defaults to Google search and having search suggestions on. I know I'd have a couple privacy settings to change.

> You know, the browser that defaults to Google search and having search suggestions on. I know I'd have a couple privacy settings to change.

And having opt-out telemetry with very limited messaging that it occurs.

To be fair, I think less technical users would think that Firefox was either broken or incapable of basic functionality (leaving a bad impression either way) if search suggestions weren’t on by default. It probably wouldn’t hurt for the default search engine to be something else though, I think most people are used to changing that.

I find search suggestions positively hostile, and is one of the first things I switch off.

I see that Mozilla has started pushing Pocket again. With the last upgrade, I got a new tab with a full-page Pocket ad. They don't need telemetry to discover that I've never used Pocket. I dislike their custom of using upgrades to stuff an ad in my face; and I dislike that scarce screen real-estate is used for an unnecessary button. If they've got to create a new tab on upgrade, it should show the changelist, not a "promotional message".

It's a bloody plug-in, and it should be possible to unplug it.

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