"Free speech" commenting extension Dissenter becomes spyware, banned from Firefox.

submitted by wizzwizz4 from github.com

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[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Here's the most I could find regarding a Dissenter response. This whole thing is really strange. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dissenter/comments/b82n3q/whats_up_with_these_permissions_pretty_sure/ejvgqao/

[–]SuperConductiveRabbi 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I had wanted the badge notification feature (which shows the number of comments on a URL) and searched around to see if anyone had brought it up before, and they had. It turns out that before Dissenter got popular the owner had said they'll never make that feature, as it requires a pingback on every URL to determine if people left any comments. (How else could it work?) He pointed out the obvious privacy implications of telling the Dissenter servers every URL that you're visiting.

Dissenter then became popular and tons of people requested that feature, and it looks like they implemented it, against their previous judgment. Now it seems Firefox has flagged it for being an invasion of privacy, even if you can disable the feature.

[–]wizzwizz4[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

They should have made it opt-in, not opt-out. It's a great feature, and really cool… but it also has privacy implications.

People who want it enough to ask for it want it enough to turn on a setting. But people who don't want it wouldn't be asking to not have it. The update silently turns a nice, secure, private extension into a piece of spyware.

[–]SuperConductiveRabbi 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Certainly agreed. It makes me think this is just a big misstep, and hopefully they'll fix it and the extension will continue to gain in popularity. It's a pretty fantastic thing to have on the web.

[–]wizzwizz4[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I think they just messed up.

Although… it's almost as though they're hiding opacity behind the illusion of transparency that open source (a necessity of being on Firefox's extension platform) provides…

Personally, I'd be inclined to suggest that they just messed up, but paranoid scepticism has its merits sometimes.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah maybe it's a whoops, they do have a checkbox to disable the behavior. So the question is, would FF really ban for phoning every website home? The FF you're banned email is pretty cryptic but maybe it was about a different technical issue altogether.

[–]wizzwizz4[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

would FF really ban for phoning every website home?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Did I say yes? Yes, they would. They'd ban for (slightly) less.¹

Whether this is actually what they banned it for is unknown. But the coincidence is strong evidence for it being the reason.

¹: They've taken disciplinary action on a developer rewriting the rules of an ad-blocking extension when the ad-blocking extension hard-coded part of their site instead of fixing the general workaround… sorry, that's politics.