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Firefox's Pocket Tries to Build a Facebook-Style Newsfeed That Respects Your Privacy (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos you find around the web to consume later, now has a home inside Firefox as the engine powering recommendations to 50 million people a month. By analyzing the articles and videos people save into Pocket, [Pocket founder and CEO Nate] Weiner believes the company can show people the best of the web -- in a personalized way -- without building an all-knowing, Facebook-style profile of the user.
"We're testing this really cool personalization system within Firefox where it uses your browser history to target personalized [recommendations], but none of that data actually comes back to Pocket or Mozilla," Weiner said. "It all happens on the client, inside the browser itself. There is this notion today... I feel like you saw it in the Zuckerberg hearings. It was like, 'Oh, users. They will give us their data in return for a better experience.' That's the premise, right? And yes, you could do that. But we don't feel like that is the required premise. There are ways to build these things where you don't have to trade your life profile in order to actually get a good experience."
Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched. Over time, that gives the company a good understanding of which links lead to high-quality content that users of either Pocket or Firefox might enjoy.
I use Firefox, but I don't use Pocket. Are there any Slashdot readers who want to share their experiences with read-it-later services, or thoughts about what Firefox is attempting?
"We're testing this really cool personalization system within Firefox where it uses your browser history to target personalized [recommendations], but none of that data actually comes back to Pocket or Mozilla," Weiner said. "It all happens on the client, inside the browser itself. There is this notion today... I feel like you saw it in the Zuckerberg hearings. It was like, 'Oh, users. They will give us their data in return for a better experience.' That's the premise, right? And yes, you could do that. But we don't feel like that is the required premise. There are ways to build these things where you don't have to trade your life profile in order to actually get a good experience."
Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched. Over time, that gives the company a good understanding of which links lead to high-quality content that users of either Pocket or Firefox might enjoy.
I use Firefox, but I don't use Pocket. Are there any Slashdot readers who want to share their experiences with read-it-later services, or thoughts about what Firefox is attempting?
How fucking dense are you, mozilla?! WE DONT WANT POCKET, NEWSFEED, ADS OR ***ANYTHING*** OTHER THAN A FUCKING BROWSER!!!!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
So who exactly are they spying on if they're respecting your privacy? I ask, because:
Pocket can analyze which articles and videos from around the web are being shared as well as which ones are being read and watched.
That sure sounds a heck of a lot like spying. How exactly is this supposed to work? Where is this data coming from?
Also, I call BS on no data making it back to Mozilla/Pocket. There's no way that can possibly work, unless it's pulling the entire recommendations database straight from Pocket. Otherwise, you can probably figure out what a person is doing based on which type of recommendations it asks for. It may be "anonymized" but don't pretend you can't figure out who it is.
Basically, I call BS on the entire premise. You can't "recommend" "popular links" without spying on people, because you have to spy on people to know what's popular. You can't "recommend" links a person "would be interested in" without spying on them, because otherwise you have to have the entire database stored in the client. If you try and only store parts of the database in the client, then you're leaking data, and privacy is compromised.
Avaliable here
therefore Facebook wannabes will suck too.
It has nothing to do with privacy: Facebook's interpretation of what social media should be makes it totally unappealing to me.
As for the privacy thing: Mozilla never gave me any reason to trust them anymore than Facebook.
So... no.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How about "NO"?
If I wanted to use Facefuck, I'd use it.
Don't ruin Firefox any further by loading it up with more bullshit and shiny social media crap that no one wants.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've been saying this for years. The whole premise behind social media and recommendation engines is broken by design. If it is working as designed then you would only ever see stuff that you "like". This puts everyone in their own private echo chamber. For entertainment this might be ok as you want to relax to something you enjoy but for news, it is a disaster and will only get worse as the algorithms improve.
When I got disgusted with Chrome for its evil-ness, I went back to FF for the nth time, and this time I saw Pocket was being forced down our throats...jumped the fuck back out and found Vivaldi which seems much less evil.
So they're reinventing an RSS feed?
WTF? Have we forgotten everything that's ever been done before, and just decided to recreate it with a new name, make a social tie-in, add some spying and data analytics to make money, and then run a marketing campaign for it?
Seriously. WTF?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I got pulled back into Firefox by the Developer Edition. I wasn't sold on Pocket at first, but so far it's turn out to be great for me. Easy to ignore when I don't care, but every time I've looked at it there have been good suggestions that I actually wanted to read.
I think the people screaming about how Mozilla needs to get back to just making a browser completely misunderstand Mozilla. The Firefox era was probably the only one where they did anything close to just making a browser. In the early days Seamonkey *was* Mozilla. It was a full suite of things. They were build XUL and XpCom and all of this as a platform with a strong html rendering engine as the backing for it all. I'm sorry that so many of you were confused by the breakout success of Firefox, but the organization has never been so narrowly defined.
"[We'll be] really getting inside your head and making it an unpleasant place to be" -- Trent Reznor