the PR and lawsuit risk

what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world’s most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it’s business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don’t face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn’t take the legal risk.

simpler metrics are enough

when has ‘enough’ ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see ‘enough’ is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

sorry i didn’t quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said ‘not much more feasible’?

Voice data isn’t

voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn’t been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

it’s already been written off as a bug. i didn’t follow that story indefinitely but i’m not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% “accidentally” send it to some ‘debug’ server somewhere.

Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

• A few people would say “no shit”
• Most people would parrot the “ive done nothing wrong so i don’t care” line.
• A few powerless people would be upset.

If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

agreed

and it would have been known

are you sure?

The reality is it is too expensive

imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

we’ve yet to see a technical explanation for why it’s “impossible/too expensive” which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

and risky

how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as “a bug”. they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we’re currently at:

“whoops it was a bug, we’ll switch it off”

“whoops another update switched it on again” (if caught, months/years later)

“whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

as long as they have deniability as a bug, there’s almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes ‘bug’ deniability more difficult.

in my experience when reading past the “they’re not listening” headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

then there’s the “they have enough data already” argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. ‘enough’ simply isn’t in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

[i didn’t downvote you btw]

no idea why you’re being downvoted.

you’re entirely correct, and i don’t interpret you as defending telegram’s lack of user protections

(noticing a real uptick in reddit hivemind around lemmy lately, it’s depressing tbh)

Everything that’s encrypted is generally more private and secure than the equivalent which isn’t encrypted

They gave a fuck about negative pr

seems roughly accurate.

but probably would add

the mayor is a good person, and genuinely appears to want to see the best in people. but most of the reported incidents involve thugs with overt connections to an organised crime syndicate which is currently so powerful they mostly don’t have to answer to anyone.

the same crime syndicate has been granted the contract to light the field, cut the grass and keep everyone safe.

the mayor has a fairly good record of delivering on good community projects. so on the one hand mayor has a good rep, on the other…it’s an organised crime syndicate who is literally one of the worst offenders when it comes to making the field unsafe in the first place.

That’s wrong. The creation of PPA isn’t about getting paid

ok that’s fair, thanks for the useful info i didn’t know that. until money or other resources change hands i’m happy to withdraw the view that while firefox is underfunded by the community, it may not have resulted in these kinds of collaborations.

what i’m not understanding is how average non-adblock running users will be better off?

i appreciate you’ve stated how the sole purpose of this collaboration is intended by mozilla.

yet unlike the current implementation which appears to be opt-out, afaict meta’s particpation here is entirely opt-in, isn’t it? if meta etc decide on a whim they want to have their cake and eat it too, what is stopping them?

imo we’re all lacking innocence, regardless of using adblockers or not. we all, myself included, haven’t funded mozilla fairly for FF.

even if viewing ads for a website was an ethically sound exchange (in principle? probably achievable; in modern implementations? highly debatable),

regardless, that revenue is naturally for the sites not for the browser. maintaining a modern browser requires non-trivial resources, alot of us get hours/day from our browsers, advertisers are getting paid, and meanwhile ff has been missing out.

i could be wrong, but my gut feeling is mozilla is (mostly) a legit organisation with genuine good interests at heart. and if we’d all donated even a fraction of what its genuinely worth, they probably wouldn’t have to make these kinds of faustian deals.

giving advertisers enough to leave innocent people alone

I think this is very optimistic, the ad industry has virtually zero incentive to play fairly here. afaict they’ve currently got it far too good to have any genuine motivation to make concessions?

if i had to guess, one of the biggest actual threats on their horizon is somehow maintaining s̶u̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ infinite growth, which is further reason for them to NOT be satisfied with an equivalent or lesser scope than they already have right now.

imo its not a matter if but when it will be discovered meta’s behaved in bad faith here. i could be wrong, and hopefully i am because it would ofc philosophically be a step in the right direction.

To suggest that Mozilla PPA has no benefit to the average user is disingenuous at best or outright malicious malpractice with the intent of defamation

Thanks. Could you give some examples how the average user benefits from this collaboration between mozilla and meta, as implemented or due for implementation in firefox?

Dunning-Kruger effect

could you please explain further what you mean and what you’re referring to?

Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.

It’s pretty clear this incident has highlighted a myriad of very important issues.

It’s likely more productive to discuss the other issues in their own threads - this thread is clearly focused on the cashless problem.

not if they’re only covering the cost of parts

and probably have some of the most depraved porn habits imaginable

they’re just projecting their own tactics on you.

they’re the one moving the goalposts with that laughable brad pitt bs.

the mental gymnastics you go through to parrot corporate propaganda is honestly just astonishing

its not the actual money laundering they object to.

it’s that they didn’t get a cut.

deleted by creator

this is the (un)fortunate reality.

unfortunate in that keeping a modern browser up to date is a serious task when you need to compete with the agenda and scale of google etc

fortunate in that its a relatively simple solution, the community needs to fund the software.

its tough though as i can imagine if they pulled the kind of popup shit wikipedia does, it will just drive people away. what people don’t realise ofc is that with chrome you are paying for it (with your data), but for some reason they’re not viewed in the equivalent light.

Thanks, do you know if/where we can download the full phind source including the full models, training data etc? To run 100% offline?

edit: for anyone reading this thread, YOU CAN’T. it’s not currently opensource. and afaik there is no concrete timeline for it to be opened, other than sometime “down the road”.

to be clear, i definitely agree we have the creative nerd factor the corporations lack, but unfortunately there’s been a bit of trading on ‘open’ while still being very closed in the “AI” world, really hope this doesn’t turn out to be another example of that.

Could you give some examples for us please?