Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla To Amazon: Show Us How You're Protecting Kids' Data (cnet.com)
Amazon's product page for its new Echo Dot Kids Edition doesn't mention the words "privacy" or "data." Mozilla thinks it should. From a report: The e-commerce company last month introduced the new, child-friendly Echo device, powered by an Alexa voice assistant that was modified for kids ages 5 to 12. The $80 gadget becomes available Wednesday, along with new kid-friendly services called FreeTime on Alexa and FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa. Just ahead of those launches, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox web browser and a growing political force in tech, on Monday said it spoke with Amazon directly about about the new device.
It asked Amazon to update the Echo Dot Kids Edition product page with specific information on how it uses children's data collected through the smart speaker. That way, parents shopping for the gadget could easily read Amazon's privacy information without having to dig around for it, Mozilla argued. Mozilla has already posted a petition on its website calling for these changes, but Ashley Boyd, Mozilla's vice president of advocacy, said in a statement Monday night that Mozilla is "heartened" that Amazon listened to its concerns. She added that Mozilla is pausing that petition while it continues to talk with Amazon.
It asked Amazon to update the Echo Dot Kids Edition product page with specific information on how it uses children's data collected through the smart speaker. That way, parents shopping for the gadget could easily read Amazon's privacy information without having to dig around for it, Mozilla argued. Mozilla has already posted a petition on its website calling for these changes, but Ashley Boyd, Mozilla's vice president of advocacy, said in a statement Monday night that Mozilla is "heartened" that Amazon listened to its concerns. She added that Mozilla is pausing that petition while it continues to talk with Amazon.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
You're soft in the head. Mozilla (corporation) is a $0.5 billion mega corp, which cuts data sharing deals with other surveillance companies, and even bought one called Pocket for its 17 million users + private info.
The non-profit Foundation is a good front to fool liberal tools such as yourself, but don't think Mozilla is any different from the rest.
And how would you prevent this sort of thing in a way that won't interfere with legit Javascript apps or be easily defeated? If it were that easy we'd have it as an extension or core feature by now. Instead we have things like uMatrix that generally work but are really fiddly.
Firefox definitely has its downsides. It gradually eats RAM until it gets too slow to use and needs to be restarted. That's why I use Chromium for most browsing - its memory leaks are mostly per tab-process and reset when you close a tab. I keep it around for things like YouTube where Chromium and its extensions can't block obnoxious ads. And on Android Firefox wins hands-down since Chrome/ium have no extension support, very basic options, and even no way to back out of a site that pollutes your history to trap you.
Of course I long for the Firefox 2.x days, where you could browse with fifty tabs on a Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM and not have problems until XP ran out of window handles. But that wasn't the same stupidly Javascript-heavy web we have today, where a single page load couldn't fit on a floppy and basic news sites pull shenanigans to defeat no-autoplay settings and make an unwanted streaming video follow you down the page while you attempt to read.
Why is it that protecting kid's data is so much more damn important than protecting people's data in general? Reach the age of majority and suddenly everybody is just OK with corporations pillaging the hell out of your data?
That's not how it should work. Everyone's data should be legally protected.