this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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Why would Mozilla pay AccuWeather in user data? This would cut into their revenue and be horrendous press. Doing so makes no sense, legit entirely illogical. AccuWeather paid to get placement on the new tabs page. But, if you're this worried about it and haven't spent time in about:config to prevent fingerprinting, tracking, and location data collection, start there for sure. Either way, this seems like a huge stretch and wouldn't make sense for Mozilla try and pull off.
I think you are saying Mozilla sold tabs screen placement to Accuweather, which means Accuweather gets user IP addresses (and therefore approximate location among other things) when the user launches the browser. So I guess the answer to OP question is yes.
And yes, opt-out is possible, but a pro-privacy approach would require opt in.
Oh, I see, I interpreted the statement as Mozilla handing over previously collected user data as payment for getting AccuWeather's widget.
However, any webpage visited in a bowser provides this info. So if you haven't stopped it happening from the get, you're handing this data over in mass. But thanks for clearing that up for me!
Sure. Normally I think of visiting a site in a browser as navigating to that site on purpose. If Mozilla sells placement in the browser so that the browser navigates to that site automatically (unless you disable that), it's invasive. That said I do remember Mozilla sets the default start page to something annoying and I had to reconfigure it to about:blank when I set up the system.