I think this comment is the prime example of Firefox being unable to do an objectively and unqualified Good Thing without a million people showering hate into the comments.
It's not just that I have high expectations of firefox, they claim to have high expectations of themselves. They heavily market themselves as being privacy friendly and often they have been, but they aren't always.
In this case, I agree that this is, largely, a "Good Thing" although not unqualified since some number of users who wouldn't have otherwise will end up repeatedly sending data to Google, probably without even being aware of it. The data they'd give up is (to me at least) small compared to the data they would have been surrendering to online translation services, but that's not really the point.
It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.
It's not like they couldn't host those files themselves at mozilla.org or (as others have pointed out) just keep them locally and avoid making a bunch of unnecessary connections to a remote host entirely. If they'd done that it would also allow Firefox Translations to work when you aren't connected to the internet.
It's really not hate though. It's love and concern. I love Firefox, and I want it to do better!
>It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.
Don't you think that except for the PII data which shouldn't be used for training at all those (training) datasets can be stored at any place and it does not make a difference from the privacy point of view? Or I wrongly interpret their purpose...
In this case, I agree that this is, largely, a "Good Thing" although not unqualified since some number of users who wouldn't have otherwise will end up repeatedly sending data to Google, probably without even being aware of it. The data they'd give up is (to me at least) small compared to the data they would have been surrendering to online translation services, but that's not really the point.
It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.
It's not like they couldn't host those files themselves at mozilla.org or (as others have pointed out) just keep them locally and avoid making a bunch of unnecessary connections to a remote host entirely. If they'd done that it would also allow Firefox Translations to work when you aren't connected to the internet.
It's really not hate though. It's love and concern. I love Firefox, and I want it to do better!