Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

You&#x27;d think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can&#x27;t make sense of this.<p>And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they&#x27;ve set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.<p>I can&#x27;t help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla&#x27;s browser.

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.<p>The browser wars are basically over<i>, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.<p>With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what&#x27;s real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.<p></i> Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox&#x2F;Mozilla 3.9% - Safari

Normally I&#x27;d say... &quot;They&#x27;d better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn&#x27;t allowed to buy any more companies&quot; but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.

Mozilla is a company in search of relevance.<p>Right now, if Mozilla doesn&#x27;t think Firefox is central to its mission and if they&#x27;re giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..<p>... I don&#x27;t see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that&#x27;s it?<p>I&#x27;d like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.<p>Except Firefox is the golden goose.<p>(Ffx user here, I&#x27;m using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn&#x27;t <i>require</i> chrome).

Cool product, but I&#x27;m actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors:<p>&gt; Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:<p><pre><code> Contact Info Identifiers Usage Data Application Search History (e.g. not your Google&#x2F;Bing&#x2F;other search engine history) Purchases Diagnostics </code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fakespot.com&#x2F;privacy-policy</a>

As much as I love Firefox, let&#x27;s not lie about the state of affairs: &quot;We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.&quot; no you are not, Firefox is <i>nowhere near</i> one of the most popular browsers. It&#x27;s essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn&#x27;t, but the good old days of &quot;we beat IE&quot; are <i>long</i> gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don&#x27;t win by being &quot;pretty decent&quot;, you win by doing things people didn&#x27;t realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It&#x27;s been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.

I&#x27;d really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser.<p>There are 1,000&#x27;s of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to...<p>Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won&#x27;t buy any more companies, and we&#x27;re going to focus on engineering.

I’m hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.

How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent?<p>You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.

I&#x27;m saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site&#x2F;extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla&#x27;s overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could&#x27;ve easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.

I think this is a great acquisition, but I&#x27;m curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?

Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to use this product to actively and manually monitor your own content.<p>Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.<p>Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla&#x27;s claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.<p>Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don&#x27;t think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.<p>[1]: A Europe fit for the digital age <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commission.europa.eu&#x2F;strategy-and-policy&#x2F;priorities-2019-2024&#x2F;europe-fit-digital-age_en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commission.europa.eu&#x2F;strategy-and-policy&#x2F;priorities-...</a><p>[2]: Mozilla Manifesto <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;about&#x2F;manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;about&#x2F;manifesto&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m surprised people are still reasoning about Mozilla in their former &quot;glory&quot;.<p>Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andreasgal.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;chrome-won&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andreasgal.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;chrome-won&#x2F;</a><p>There&#x27;s nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox&#x27;s course. It&#x27;s not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.<p>The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?<p>All of this made possible by &quot;easy money&quot;. They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.<p>As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they&#x27;re learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service&#x2F;product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.<p>As such, it&#x27;s odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they&#x27;ll never learn.

Presume they&#x27;ll bring the add-on into their standard monitoring &#x2F; security checking!<p>&quot;This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;fakespot-fake-reviews-amazon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;fakespot-fake...</a>

Is Pocket going to start recommending &quot;fakespot certified&quot; products via affiliate links?

I used Fakespot a few years ago. It seemed to work well at that time. I switched computers and didn&#x27;t go back to it (probably out of laziness).<p>Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?

I guess I&#x27;m in the minority in that I love Fakespot as a tool to determine the &quot;real&quot; review scores of products on Amazon and other online shops. I get tired of the &quot;1000 reviews, 5 stars&quot; that turns out to be pure garbage. Instead, I find that half of the very amazing 5 star, 10k reviews products are rated a C, D, or F.<p>I think it&#x27;d be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what&#x27;s real or &quot;likely fake&quot; when browsing the web of tomorrow.

I would prefer Mozilla spend effort in improving the performance of Firefox; I always switch to it and then, to my repeated dismay, always fall back to Chrome because it just feels snappier.<p>Instead of identifying fake content, I&#x27;m more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.

Wow, Mozilla is acquiring a side-project that&#x27;s actually useful? Color me pleased. Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service.

Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they&#x27;re at it, how about telling apart original content from copycat sites?<p>But what&#x27;s really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?

Please Mozilla just give me built in tab groups.<p>FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.

It would too suspicious if Google directly buys Fakespot (a control on which allows to manipulate any review autencity). So Mozilla, which is totally funded from Google money, buys them.<p>A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies:<p>- ok<p>- do not sell or share my personal information<p>How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference.<p>There&#x27;s no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta&#x2F;Facebook (!) and Google).<p>It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.

Mozilla only exists so Google and Microsoft can claim that they have no monopoly on the browser market. That is why many of Mozillas moves basically make no sense.

Fakespot is one of those utilities that is better if fewer people know about it.<p>If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.

It looks like the Fakespot add-on is NOT one of the ~20 approved add-ons in Firefox for Android.<p>It&#x27;d be funny if it wasn&#x27;t so frustrating.

This is interesting. FakeSpot is already getting aggressive with injected ads and recommendations on product listing pages (Amazon as an example) and this tells me they&#x27;re going money-heavy, while Mozilla on the other hand might have much left at all actually. How exactly the financial aspect shapes out remains to be seen.

Funnily enough, I happened to visit fakespot for the first time in ages today, after I discovered that reviewmeta is dead. It looks like the functionality has already been bundled into Firefox&#x2F;Chrome extensions instead of being a standalone website, and they&#x27;re already pushing an AI angle. That was quick.

I see a lot of people here complaining that Mozilla isn&#x27;t spending enough of its money on the development of Firefox, but a lot of that money comes from their Google deal. If Firefox started to gain market share over Chrome, do you think that Google would continue to fund them, and if not then who would?

This will probably allow building a detailed model of every FF user (as Fakespot will be probably enabled by default). Not only browsing history (like in a failed Google Chrome FLoC attempt). Shopping interests, behavior on every page and so on. Even mouse movements and key press frequences.

So, how long before Cloudflare buys Mozilla or Brave (or builds it own)? Feels like they would be a better long term home than Mozilla surviving off an annual stipend from Google.

Did they mean to say &quot;Firefox [has] a lineage that dates back to the origins of the i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ web&quot;? Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, not the Internet.

I tried to use Pocket and just couldn&#x27;t get into it. Software like Adblock and this fakespot thing have to be part of the browser for it to work seamless.

Will this acquisition enable Fakespot to focus on their core offering instead of continuing to sell user search and purchase data?

I think safari and Chrome will enjoy a duopoly with Brave in the running...

How does Mozilla even have the money to do this? I thought they were broke.

Is the acquisition price listed anywhere?

...and people still think mozilla is on their side.

I thought you have no money, Mozilla? What are you doing?

Ironically it’s humans that generate spam and choose to, and are incentivized to continue to choose to, monetize content.<p>I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit.<p>So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.