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Mozilla Writes To European Commission About Facebook's Lack of Ad Transparency (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Facebook has been no stranger to controversy and scandal over the years, but things have been particularly bad over the last twelve months. The latest troubles find Mozilla complaining to the European Commission about the social network's lack of transparency, particularly when it comes to political advertising. Mozilla's Chief Operating Officer, Denelle Dixon, has penned a missive to Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. She bemoans the fact that Facebook makes it impossible to conduct analysis of ads, and this in turn prevents Mozilla from offering full transparency to European citizens -- something it sees as important in light of the impending EU elections.
If anyone should be investigating them, it should be the SEC and DoJ because of all of the hinky things that have come out like their tolerance for "friendly fraud," the number of bots (goosing stats to sell ads) and such.
While we're at it, what we really need is something like Brave's wallet/patron system to go global and burn the ad industry to the ground.
Trouble is no one can agree what unnecessary features are.
You might reasonably argue that anything that can be an extension should be an extension.
Unfortunately that makes Firefox out of the box kind of annoying and useless. For many users if they have to download a bunch of extensions to stop it sucking, they'll just think it sucks and go right back to chrome. So features that are technically unnecessary are socially necessary in order for Firefox to maintain its market share.
Also another thing is that Mozilla is championing the cause of the open web without spying. In practice that means they need to provide services that people like Google provide in order to do so in a way that isn't evil.
That's their reasoning and its sound in general. No idea if its sound in the case of pocket though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.