[IP] Mozilla phancies doing a Phorm

Hi Dave:

From The Register (UK), for IP if you wish:

cheers

Brian

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/firefox_data_snoop/

Mozilla phancies doing a Phorm

Firefox - your friendly data snooper

By Andrew Orlowski

The Phorm bug is spreading. The idea of collecting a user's browsing

history and flogging that data doesn't just appeal to ISPs. The

Mozilla Foundation, the people behind the Firefox browser, want some

of that action too.

The Foundation is officially a tax exempt non-profit - but still

manages to pay its chairperson $500,000 a year. Executives last week

confirmed they are working on a project referred to internally as

"Data". This would gather anonymised data on a voluntary basis, and

provide the analytical information for anyone who wanted it.

But recent history reminds us that "anonymised" data is anything but

anonymous. Meanwhile, bugs in the bloated browser have blown

supposedly "private" data wide open.

Mozilla claims Firefox has around 170m users, which means it has

more users than the largest ISP outside China. So it's easy to see

why the temptation is there.

"There are worlds of information about how people use the web that

are locked up and not currently shared," tootles Mozilla CEO John

Lilly.

But what's a non-profit web browser doing building in a

data-gathering infrastructure? It would be creepy if we discovered

say Nokia putting stealth recording equipment into its handsets. But

this is creepier still.

Michael Arrington, who Nick Carr described as the "Madam of the Web

2.0 brothel", thinks it's a great idea.

"The potential is huge. Tell them in the comments below and on

Lilly's blog how much you want this to happen," he urged in the

Washington Post.

(You can't trust Web 2.0 evangelists with privacy, we've noted

before. People forget that AOL's notorious data leak was not

accidental, but intentional - a gift to the hive mind. For some

network utopians, the biggest regret about the scandal was that we

wouldn't see more such gifts.)

Cryptome puts it more succinctly - "Firefox Ponders Suicide".

--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = "" href="http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell">http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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