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

submitted by wizzwizz4 from github.com

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[–]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.