The new data transmission permissions seem to be misleading to users
discourse.mozilla.org
I’m the developer or SponsorBlock, an add-on for skipping integrated sponsorships, intros, outros and other unwanted sections of YouTube videos. It is a crowdsourced add-on, and relies on submissions on each individual YouTube video. Because of this, it fetches data from the server asking what submissions exist for a video, and uses that to skip parts of it. But privacy is integral, and we take many steps to make that the case. The add-on does not send what video you are watching to the server,...
  • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
    39·
    1 day ago

    Well this is indeed misleading. It was actually great to see the dev of “return YouTube dislikes” chime in too since I disabled the addon because I saw the new permissions and noped the fuck out

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
    22·
    1 day ago

    I swear that this is intentionally made. It wouldn’t surprise me if the companies that sell our data pushed or even pay for this verbiage in order to scare regular users out of using these helpful extensions.

    Yeah, I know I sound paranoid as fuck, but can you really blame me?

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      companies that sell our data

      You can just say “Google”.

      Always keep in mind that Google pays for Firefox. But in order to avoid a monopoly investigation they only need Firefox to exist, they don’t need it to be good.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        Yeah. It’s certainly impressive how we’ve come to suspect specific companies of each shitty move in our lives, and usually be 100% correct in our suspicions.

        Anything that points at fucking up gaming is going to be Sony, Microsoft, EA or Ubisoft (not accounting for some of the smaller companies that are certain to be part of an organized ring of games-destroying “gaming” companies".

        For personal surveillance, while governments, data brokers and hackers are the main beneficiaries, every single tech company is involved at some level, and we can usually point out which ones are part of any specific case fairly easy.

        But what blows my mind the most is that, because there is no real push-back, they feel comfortable not trying to deny any of their predatory and mafia-like practices anymore. Sure, if we make enough noise their PR teams will drop a few social media bullshit posts to calm down the masses, and then just drop the subject entirely hoping it just dies down over time, or in extreme cases, pedal back for a few months, and then just do it anyway, since people will stop caring about it at some point (for example, Reddit).

        And something I’ve been thinking lately is making more and more sense every day, when I see shot like this. What if they are betting on us getting tired of fighting against this and just giving in because of the sheer volume of shitty things every company is doing? It’s such a large volume of tracking, surveillance, control, deception, predatory TOSs, etc, that they know we cannot focus on all of it at once, much less care about a few for a long period of time because 5 more will pop up between the start of lunch and paying the bill.

        Wao, I was going to post a short reply like “yeah, we’re fucked” and ended up basically making a micro-wiki, sorry about that.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I did not completely agree at first, but now I remembered google using similar language to justify taking away crucial addon APIs

  • A_norny_mousse@piefed.zipEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    But these new data transmission permissions seem to require us to declare many things anyway which are going to make users very confused.

    I’ve seen this before, in principle.

    Somewhere between an honest effort to not confuse non-technical users and a deliberate attempt to push out truly powerful addons (that might affect Big Tech sites’ bottom line). I know fediversians are going to say “definitely the latter” but I can never quite make up my mind.

    I guess there should be overrides a lá “I know this is potentially dangerous but I definitely know what I’m doing”.

    When will it become impossible to access about:config?