Hi all, On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 3:56 PM, Xidorn Quan <m...@upsuper.org> wrote:
> It's fine to embed this experiment in the product, and blog about it, but > it's definitely not fine to have it enabled by default and send every DNS > request to a third-party. > > I can understand that the intent must be good, and for better privacy, but > the approach of doing so is not acceptable. Users would think Firefox is > going to just send data to arbitrary third-party without agreement from > them. > > As you can see from the replies, almost all people outside the network > team has expressed concerns about this, which should be considered a signal > already that how other technical users may feel about this experiment, and > how technical news would create a title for this. > Let me add my voice as a person outside the network team who can understand the concerns and _still thinks we should be doing this_. In particular, I'd like to argue against Henri Sivonen's rhetorical question, "Why risk upsetting users in this case instead of obtaining consent first?" In today's age of impenetrable licensing agreements, the defaults matter. It's not reasonable for users of the Web to assume the totality of the risks of using the Web, and I think it's critical that Mozilla assume some risk for its users. That's why we should be bold, try things, and figure out if we can move the default to be better for the mass market. (This was one of the points that Mikko Hyppönen emphasized for the security industry in his recent talk to Mozilla.) With regard to this experiment: we have a default right now that has evolved over the last two decades to privilege forces close to the user (ISP, DNS provider). This experiment privileges forces farther away from the user (the DoH provider). The hope, as I see it, is that there will be more robust competition in the market when the DoH provider can be unbundled from the last mile connectivity provider. (We've seen that last mile connectivity providers don't have a lot of competition in many parts of the world.) I am interpreting this as something parallel to VPN providers, where there's a robust market with diversified offerings. Right now, users have two functional choices: ISP-provided DNS or Google's DNS, and both have serious downsides. I think it's 100% Mozilla's role to negotiate privacy-respecting agreements and service contracts -- things that no individual user can arrange at this time. I'm willing to upset some users in order to shift the defaults at scale. Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
