Ask HN: Why can't Mozilla offer a paid privacy tier?

22 points by funerr 1 year ago | 18 comments

I love firefox and want to support it, I hate seeing the direction the company goes to with privacy.

franga2000 1 year ago |

What are you referring to exactly? If Mozilla told you "sure, we'll take your money and give you a more privacy-preserving browser", what would you want to be different about it?

acd 1 year ago |

Mozilla need to remove Javascript finger printing identity from the browser

Try it from a VPN https://amiunique.org/

morjom 1 year ago | |

and get Fission to the point where it can be on by default.

xyzal 1 year ago |

I would love to see a 'Donate to Firefox' button in Firefox. I would even donate on a monthly basis.

throwaway74354 1 year ago | |

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit organization, they can't handle donations. Mozilla Foundation don't need your money and won't use it to fund Firefox.

nottorp 1 year ago | |

As long as the money goes to the browser, not the latest blockchain/“ai” initiative.

DeepSeaTortoise 1 year ago | | |

Then who else will be "Co-Creating a Feminist AI Alliance for Climate Justice", "Exploring sustainable intersections between climate change, environmental data and digital inclusion" and fight "the spread of harmful content like hate speech, misinformation, and synthetic media"?

People making fun of such events held at African luxory resorts do not understand that after the event ended, Zambia's tech literacy increased measureably.

rererereferred 1 year ago | |

You are better off donating to Ladybird.

not_your_vase 1 year ago |

What do you mean specifically by paid privacy tier? Mozilla offers some privacy oriented paid services... one comment here mentions VPN, then there is Monitor Plus for online data scrubbing, Firefox Relay for message masking, just from the top of my head

Vinnl 1 year ago | |

To add to that, privacy features that can be offered for free, like tracking protection in Firefox, often are, and thus are available to everyone. Services like Relay, VPN and Monitor Plus, which require upkeep of infrastructure, are paid or have paid tiers.

(Disclosure: I worked on both Relay and Monitor, but this is my own interpretation; I don't set pricing strategy.)

BrianHenryIE 1 year ago |

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

magic_smoke_ee 1 year ago |

Then you're using Brave or Opera.

surrTurr 1 year ago |

Because it's not a billion dollar super scale business (that's apparently the only thing worth pursuing)

vouaobrasil 1 year ago |

If you care about privacy, use the internet less. There is no world in which free things like the internet will also be privacy-respecting once it starts to generate economic output.

dehugger 1 year ago | |

Sure there is, it's just not a capitalist world.

immibis 1 year ago |

You mean like Mozilla VPN?

fufufafa 1 year ago |

becuase google is frienemy

devops99 1 year ago |

Something you can do for free is block all outbound traffic and configure Firefox to use an outbound HTTPS proxy where you can dynamically enforce a blocklist or default deny and an allowlist.

Isolate Firefox traffic and observe it some time.