The logic around spending this much money to advertise something that also cost you money is odd, but at least the interview with the creator is... similarly pretty unusual.
I definitely wouldn’t call myself anti-AI – I’m not a technical person, so I wouldn’t have been able to create something like this three or four years ago, before AI’s help. I think that’s really cool, as are a lot of the other things AI is empowering people to do.
Huh.
I just want people to keep thinking critically about our own relationship to these tools, and about the tenor of the cultural conversation around AI (hence the billboard)...
...especially with all the speculation of [an AI] bubble.
Jokes aside, though, I think this whole stunt is perfectly harmless, and it could be an indicator that maybe lonely people should have more opportunities to talk to lonely people. Especially outside of the context of whatever attention-draining social media apps Big Tech has to offer.
Interesting tidbit I gleaned from the Hacker News comments:
Mozilla does sell users' data. That's how the sponsored links and stories work .
Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking.
While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.
And the content appears to be AI-generated summaries of Twitter conversations. Phenomenal.
An older version of the website just redirected to digg.com/ai ("AI news, before it trends", and the archived copy seems to have an ironically oversized Twitter logo).
Poor Digg. If they'd only come around a year or two earlier, they could've made bank selling NFTs.
I've never seen a "privacy minded person" downplay a powerful corporation surveilling its customers. Quite the opposite. People with a privacy mindset would see a red flag with a loyalty plan, and this article explains it in.
Disliking the article is a different topic. I think it's fine - it trusts the average person will understand intuitively that this surveillance is bad, but for extra detail, they linked a 41 page report that explains how loyalty programs are used to abuse customers.
I hope you didn't mean to imply that this private data is not sold to insurance companies. Unless the article states otherwise, one should assume your eating habits are being sold to insurance providers . Privacy Policies are written by lawyers for a reason.
I was going to say, we barely have open-source cellphone OSes right now, and the most functional ones exist only because a surveillance company gave away their early code in a successful bid for market dominance. Something similar would probably play out for pervert glasses.
I find it kind of funny that this is where you draw the line. First off, I don't think calling AI a tool is particularly accurate because it's trivially easy to control/predict the output of a tool, but you can't control the output of an AI. You're just losing a little more control here with their decision.
Exactly. "Guardrails" are already ill-defined, so it's more than likely that a few companies (with lawyers) can say "we have them, China and small businesses don't."
OpenAI/Anthropic might as well say they're the only companies operating with benevolent invisible wizards, and nobody else is.
They wrote they’d like to see AI executives testify “about the causes of these incidents, what failures or potential negligence at the companies led to them, and the types of regulation required to make sure they never happen again.”
"Thank you for your question, Mr. Senator. The product I manufacture is going to create an apocalypse or a second industrial revolution any day now. Just ask my sworn enemy Eliezer Yudkowsky!
"But we care about humans, and we'd be happy to set up vague, non-deterministic guardrails that only companies with my level of annualized revenue can afford."
I don't know if you saw this post yet, but at least somebody is maintaining a Facebook filter list. Hopefully that means you can keep using uBO in peace, provided the right lists are enabled.
While first-party ads (including on sites like Facebook and Reddit) are different than third-party ads, filter lists don't discriminate between the two. Brave's ad blocking engine (which Mozilla imported) is capable of removing all of them.
In other words, Mozilla is going out of their way to add an exemption here.
It's not just Google who gets preferential treatment. They also promise to provide special exceptions to:
Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers
These under-the-table deals obviously contribute far, far less (15%÷4 is much smaller than 85%, and that's assuming they provide all the remaining revenue).
How do you think [Google money] influenced the product development conversation?
Well... There's definitely a nonzero chance that Google is capable of manipulating the development of Firefox behind the scenes, and I consider that possibility to be disconcerting. That suggests Firefox is controlled opposition, either in practice or in effect .
The corpos like it more that way. After a little lobbying, a popular politician tells the world that their product is actually Great and Mighty, the media repeats it uncritically, and the public believes it.
Doesn't matter if the product isn't Great and Mighty, the stock goes up.
Facebook really wants a legal monopoly on the concept of pervert glasses, don't they?
There are some pretty strong indicators that every search engine in Firefox is due to some kind of opaque under-the-table deal.
The logic around spending this much money to advertise something that also cost you money is odd, but at least the interview with the creator is... similarly pretty unusual.
Huh.
Jokes aside, though, I think this whole stunt is perfectly harmless, and it could be an indicator that maybe lonely people should have more opportunities to talk to lonely people. Especially outside of the context of whatever attention-draining social media apps Big Tech has to offer.
If that's all it takes for you to recommend against Vivaldi, you would also tell people to avoid Firefox, right?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/21/some-mullvad-vpn-customers-tunnel-for-exit-after-co-founder-donates-millions-to-populist-party/5275012
Firefox users expressed displeasure here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ugkeuj/will_mozilla_end_its_partnership_with_mullvad/
Mozilla: "But we are also an open source AI startup"!
Mozilla's dependency on Google has apparently warped their activism into fighting against these antitrust lawsuits since early 2025:
Interesting tidbit I gleaned from the Hacker News comments:
From here , with some minor formatting changes
I just visited digg.com and got redirected to digg.com/tech. The article titles are
And the content appears to be AI-generated summaries of Twitter conversations. Phenomenal.
An older version of the website just redirected to digg.com/ai ("AI news, before it trends", and the archived copy seems to have an ironically oversized Twitter logo).
Poor Digg. If they'd only come around a year or two earlier, they could've made bank selling NFTs.
I've never seen a "privacy minded person" downplay a powerful corporation surveilling its customers. Quite the opposite. People with a privacy mindset would see a red flag with a loyalty plan, and this article explains it in.
Disliking the article is a different topic. I think it's fine - it trusts the average person will understand intuitively that this surveillance is bad, but for extra detail, they linked a 41 page report that explains how loyalty programs are used to abuse customers.
I hope you didn't mean to imply that this private data is not sold to insurance companies. Unless the article states otherwise, one should assume your eating habits are being sold to insurance providers . Privacy Policies are written by lawyers for a reason.
The article makes a great case for why privacy-minded people should care
I was going to say, we barely have open-source cellphone OSes right now, and the most functional ones exist only because a surveillance company gave away their early code in a successful bid for market dominance. Something similar would probably play out for pervert glasses.
I find it kind of funny that this is where you draw the line. First off, I don't think calling AI a tool is particularly accurate because it's trivially easy to control/predict the output of a tool, but you can't control the output of an AI. You're just losing a little more control here with their decision.
Exactly. "Guardrails" are already ill-defined, so it's more than likely that a few companies (with lawyers) can say "we have them, China and small businesses don't."
OpenAI/Anthropic might as well say they're the only companies operating with benevolent invisible wizards, and nobody else is.
That's the funny thing. We don't need to bother. The AI "creators" are doing that job for us.
"Thank you for your question, Mr. Senator. The product I manufacture is going to create an apocalypse or a second industrial revolution any day now. Just ask my sworn enemy Eliezer Yudkowsky!
"But we care about humans, and we'd be happy to set up vague, non-deterministic guardrails that only companies with my level of annualized revenue can afford."
I don't know if you saw this post yet, but at least somebody is maintaining a Facebook filter list. Hopefully that means you can keep using uBO in peace, provided the right lists are enabled.
While first-party ads (including on sites like Facebook and Reddit) are different than third-party ads, filter lists don't discriminate between the two. Brave's ad blocking engine (which Mozilla imported) is capable of removing all of them.
In other words, Mozilla is going out of their way to add an exemption here.
It's not just Google who gets preferential treatment. They also promise to provide special exceptions to:
These under-the-table deals obviously contribute far, far less (15%÷4 is much smaller than 85%, and that's assuming they provide all the remaining revenue).
Well... There's definitely a nonzero chance that Google is capable of manipulating the development of Firefox behind the scenes, and I consider that possibility to be disconcerting. That suggests Firefox is controlled opposition, either in practice or in effect .
It also implies revocation of consent, which is something that you can't claim in the future if you don't try to delete your comments.
Defeatism just serves the agenda of the corporations, which is why it's always unfortunate to see somebody evangelizing it.
The corpos like it more that way. After a little lobbying, a popular politician tells the world that their product is actually Great and Mighty, the media repeats it uncritically, and the public believes it.
Doesn't matter if the product isn't Great and Mighty, the stock goes up.
I'm kind of surprised that when it comes to iOS, Firefox is the last browser to introduce ad-blocking.
An independent developer even made a Gecko-based browser that runs in iOS and (once installed) has full uBlock Origin support without any hacks