You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.

Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.

If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.

Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!

Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing

<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>

<a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>

User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.

Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.

I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:

we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.

• Is Firefox trying to be my default browser in a sneaky way?
• Mozilla sends pop-up ad overlay in Firefox
• How do I completely disable this “reminder” from popping up again?
• Firefox reminds users to backup data and verify it periodically
• Keep pesky trackers off your tail

All those points are about how one server communicates with itself. Federation doesn’t factor into it

Oh yeah, you can do that too. I just never have it for apps I want to clone.

In the meme, yeah. There are others though:

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

Kind of ironic considering that with Matrix…

• Forward secrecy is kinda hosed
• they store metadata permanently on their servers by design
• A ton of stuff that would otherwise be invisible and signal is visible in your Matrix homeserver, including permanent history of all group membership
• Your data does not belong to you, and that’s how the server is built to treat it, e.g.
• GDPR deletion is nonexistent (it won’t delete your username or your messages, making it less effective than on Discord, let alone Signal)

… Etc.

Ironically, older federated messaging systems like XMPP might be better by coincidence. Message archiving was an optional addition and some servers, such as the popular Riseup one, do not implement it.

Shelter is a nice FOSS app.

Samsungs also have Secure Folder…

Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they’ve already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with “the most backdoor looking bug” with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.

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