Firefox Marketplace – A caravan, for me ma!

Gold rush, in the digital form. That is, ladies and gents, what we call the mobile market. A success of one is an indicator of potential success for many. Hence, you get the proliferation of mobile operating systems for mobile devices. You have iOS, you have Android, some others, and soon, you might have FirefoxOS. At this point in time, you might be asking yourselves how the title might be relevant to the story. Worry not, it shall all be revealed soon.

http://netrunner-mag.com/?p=2543


Cheers,
Mrk

 

From the (must read) Firefox Marketplace privacy policy at https://marketplace.firefox.com/privacy-policy:

Regarding the first bold part, when I looked at Mozilla's single signon (ugh) system it appeared that your identity is your verified email address. IOW, it appeared that whenever you use Mozilla Persona to login somewhere your email address will be communicated to the site you are trying to login to. Which is unfortunate because although there would be many cases where you would have to provide an email address anyway, there are other cases where providing an email address is not necessary. Mozilla Persona seemed designed to prevent the later more privacy friendly scenarios

Regarding the second bold part, I find that very discouraging. It suggests that their plan is that even if you download a free app or addon you will be forced to have a Persona single signon account, cough up a verified email address, and open yourself up to tracking of installs and other things. Well, unless you setup separate Persona accounts for each thing you download and take whatever other steps are necessary to prevent linkages. A bit later in that privacy policy:

This suggests that you'll, typically at least, also be sharing some info with the developer of the app. Which in some cases would be necessary, in many cases unnecessary

I wonder if all Firefox addons will be distributed this way in the future.