Mozilla, reading the room extremely well, seemingly just recently flipped the switch to enable-by-default sponsored weather results from AccuWeather in every new Firefox tab you open. Clicking "Learn more" takes you here, with zero information on if yo...
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Mozilla, reading the room extremely well, seemingly just recently flipped the switch to enable-by-default sponsored weather results from AccuWeather in every new Firefox tab you open. Clicking "Learn more" takes you here, with zero information on if your location is sent to AccuWeather every time you open a new tab: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-firefox-new-tab-page
Probably only noticed because I normally have a blank new tab page but this showed up after updating Firefox!
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Furthermore, would "hiding weather on new tab" actually stop this feature from still regularly sending my location to AccuWeather? Great question! I have no idea
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After checking about:config, "Hide weather on New Tab" sets the config value "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.showWeather" to "false", but leaves "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.weatherfeed" as the default of "true". So, my suspicion was correct, #Firefox is still sending your location off every 30 minutes to get the weather in the background by default even if you disable this new widget: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/newtab/lib/WeatherFeed.sys.mjs #infosec #privacy
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I think "constantly broadcast my location to a 3rd party by default and don't tell me about it or what's happening with that data and then keep doing it when I think I've disabled it" is pretty obviously a terrible privacy default
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@ryanfb I dunno if it's documented anywhere and I'm not a fan of the widget, but according to someone on the Mozilla alumni Slack server it sends location data through a proxy such that your location is never tied to your IP address or any other info before AccuWeather sees it.
I really wish they put that on the settings for it, instead of just... not mentioning it. Ugh.
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Even more concerning than just the privacy issue this presents on its own, is that this feature made it all the way through to wide release without these objections being heard or maybe even raised https://digipres.club/@ryanfb/113125414314546768
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smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)replied to Ryan Baumann last edited by
Great. The complete and utter #enshittification of #Firefox continues. #HyperCapitalism
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@ryanfb the fact that the support page was edited since you posted this makes them look even worse here. they are doing clean up after releasing a really badly thought out "feature"