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In this article on FLoC, the Firefox folks are quoted as saying “defaults matter.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So why’s Google your default search engine when you purport to protect privacy, Mozilla? (Surely it’s not the ~$0.5 billion they pay you every year.)

cxl.com/blog/floc-dovekey/

in reply to Aral Balkan

That's what happens when your mission is not solely to create a browser. if that would be the case, their decisions would reflect that. They want people's data, attention or currency. It is like General Motors saying that all they want is to create vehicles for people, in order for them to go from one place to another. We know that's a lie. Firefox is probably not at all a GM monster, but they for sure do not simply want to "create a browser". They want more than that.
in reply to Aral Balkan

Oh, it's worse than that. Mozilla pioneered the FLoC-like method of personal surveillance. You could say that they have acted as Google's skunkworks. If you are using vanilla Firefox then you're already FLoC'd by default, and it's hard to turn off.

Monitoring your browser interactions and then sending the data back to the mothership whenever the browser restarts (eg. an upgrade), with commercial partners deciding what statistics should be gathered, is what Mozilla has been doing in the last few years. You won't find much about it in their privacy blurb though. I think it's a dimension of why they have been consistently losing browser market share.

in reply to Aral Balkan

Also appatently Firefox uses Google's safe browsing as well.
in reply to Someone

pretty much every major browser uses Google’s safe browsing
in reply to Blueberry

This is what I struggle with. What to use that has a balance of feature vs freedom?
in reply to Jonathan Spark

personally, I don’t care what the defaults are as long as I can configure it to do what I expect of a browser
in reply to Blueberry

And that’s exactly what Google is banking on because they know 99% of folks won’t change the defaults. All they need are the defaults to be in their favour.
Unknown parent

hubzilla - Link to source
Hans Wolters
You can make DDG your own search engine. Do be aware they are using GET params (logfiles, transparent proxies, etc..)
Unknown parent

hubzilla - Link to source
Hans Wolters
Yes, the sad thing is that there are always issues. Startpage does use POST but I do not see them a lot anymore.