Comment on Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox
comador@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThey put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical.
Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way? On the contrary, they’re pretty damned clear about
Their brand vivaldi.com/for-a-better-web/
Vivaldi is headquartered In Norway, proudly employee-owned, with no external investors pulling the strings. This means we make decisions that are best for you, not for shareholders’ profit. We build the browser we want to use, listening to our users to create a web experience that’s free, powerful, and uniquely yours.
Their user security vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/
We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.
and their sustainability umatechnology.org/why-vivaldis-anti-ai-browser-is…
So I’m sorry, but your own comment sounds absurd because it lacks any proof thereof.
None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.
No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.
mjr@infosec.pub 1 day ago
In the bit I quoted from what was linked. Of course, they don’t phrase it like that, but it’s what they’re doing.
…which is immediately contradicted lower down the page by most paragraphs in “Type and purpose of data collected by third party vendors”. OK, it’s not personal information, but it is still information that they’re sharing with third parties.
It’s also not clear to me how much notice they give of changes to that policy, either.
That’s privacy not security, though. The basic problem is that we can’t look at all the code, audit it, modify it, test it, check it always behaves well.
But this has been tried before. I’ve worked in employee-owned software companies for decades and seen many others come and go. Attempting to hold part of your code hostage seems doomed to fail eventually: most go bust, and some get bought out by so-called “carpet-baggers”. To succeed in an ethical way, they need to find a way to get paid to develop the software, not fall into the trap of creating it and then trying to get paid later by keeping part of it secret. I don’t want to be caught in the fallout yet again if another company learns this the hard way and then their software becomes obsolete and lost.