Meta wants to force Apple and Google to verify the ages of people downloading apps from their app stores, reports the Washington Post — and now Meta's campaign "is picking up momentum" with legislators in the U.S. Congress.

Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online. Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington.

That could be shifting. Two congressional Republicans are preparing a new age verification bill that places the burden on app stores, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans... The bill would be the first of its kind on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have called for expanding guardrails for children amid concerns about the risks of social media but where political divisions have bogged down talks. The measure would give parents the right to sue an app store if their child was exposed to certain content, such as lewd or sexual material, according to a copy obtained by the Tech Brief. App stores could be protected against legal claims, however, if they took steps to protect children against harms, such as verifying their ages and giving parents the ability to block app downloads.
The article points out that U.S. lawmakers "have the power to set national standards that could override state efforts if they so choose..."

"Steven Adair, of cybersecurity firm Veloxity, revealed at the Cyberwarcon security conference how Russian hackers were able to daisy-chain as many as three separate Wi-Fi networks in their efforts to attack victims," writes Longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. Wired reports: Adair says that Volexity first began investigating the breach of its DC customer's network in the first months of 2022, when the company saw signs of repeated intrusions into the customer's systems by hackers who had carefully covered their tracks. Volexity's analysts eventually traced the compromise to a hijacked user's account connecting to a Wi-Fi access point in a far end of the building, in a conference room with external-facing windows. Adair says he personally scoured the area looking for the source of that connection. "I went there to physically run down what it could be. We looked at smart TVs, looked for devices in closets. Is someone in the parking lot? Is it a printer?" he says. "We came up dry."

Only after the next intrusion, when Volexity managed to get more complete logs of the hackers' traffic, did its analysts solve the mystery: The company found that the hijacked machine which the hackers were using to dig around in its customer's systems was leaking the name of the domain on which it was hosted -- in fact, the name of another organization just across the road. "At that point, it was 100 percent clear where it was coming from," Adair says. "It's not a car in the street. It's the building next door." With the cooperation of that neighbor, Volexity investigated that second organization's network and found that a certain laptop was the source of the street-jumping Wi-Fi intrusion. The hackers had penetrated that device, which was plugged into a dock connected to the local network via Ethernet, and then switched on its Wi-Fi, allowing it to act as a radio-based relay into the target network. Volexity found that, to break into that target's Wi-Fi, the hackers had used credentials they'd somehow obtained online but had apparently been unable to exploit elsewhere, likely due to two-factor authentication.

Volexity eventually tracked the hackers on that second network to two possible points of intrusion. The hackers appeared to have compromised a VPN appliance owned by the other organization. But they had also broken into the organization's Wi-Fi from another network's devices in the same building, suggesting that the hackers may have daisy-chained as many as three networks via Wi-Fi to reach their final target. "Who knows how many devices or networks they compromised and were doing this on," says Adair. Volexity had presumed early on in its investigation that the hackers were Russian in origin due to their targeting of individual staffers at the customer organization focused on Ukraine. Then in April, fully two years after the original intrusion, Microsoft warned of a vulnerability in Windows' print spooler that had been used by Russia's APT28 hacker group -- Microsoft refers to the group as Forest Blizzard -- to gain administrative privileges on target machines. Remnants left behind on the very first computer Volexity had analyzed in the Wi-Fi-based breach of its customer exactly matched that technique. "It was an exact one-to-one match," Adair says.

Netflix is looking toward Discord for help in figuring out who, exactly, is leaking unreleased footage from some of its popular shows. From a report: The Northern District of California court issued a subpoena on Thursday to compel Discord to share information that can help identify a Discord user who's reportedly involved in leaking episodes and images from Netflix shows like Arcane and Squid Game.

Documents filed alongside the subpoena specifically call out an unreleased and copyrighted image from the second season of Squid Game, posted by a Discord user @jacejohns4n. In an interview linked on the user's now deleted X account, published on Telegram, the leaker claimed responsibility for the self-described "worst leak in streaming history," where episodes of Arcane, Heartstopper, Dandadan, Terminator Zero, and other shows were published online. Netflix confirmed in August that a post production studio was hacked.

Mozilla has warned that the Justice Department's proposed breakup of Google could harm independent web browsers, pushing back against a key element of the government's antitrust remedy.

The maker of Firefox browser said in a statement the DOJ's blanket ban on search revenue-sharing deals would disproportionately impact smaller players that rely on such agreements, while failing to meaningfully increase competition in search.

Firefox and similar browsers account for a small share of US search queries but provide crucial alternatives for privacy-conscious consumers, Mozilla said. The DOJ's wide-ranging proposal, submitted to a federal court in Washington, includes forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser and prohibiting the company from paying other firms to set Google as their default search engine.

The plan follows an August ruling that found Google illegally monopolized the search market. In a statement, Mozilla argued that rather than an outright prohibition on search agreements, remedies should focus on "addressing the barriers to competition and facilitating a marketplace that promotes competition and consumer choice."

The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start "digital end of life planning" and offered tips on how to do it. The Center's somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn't know their usernames or passwords. The resulting "digital legacy" can be unpleasant to resolve, the agency warns, so suggested four steps to simplify ensure our digital legacies aren't complicated:

- Ensuring family members can unlock your smartphone or computer in case of emergency;
- Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords;
- Consider putting those details in a document intended to be made available when your life ends;
- Use a service that allows you to designate someone to have access to your smartphone and other accounts once your time on Earth ends.

The Center suggests now is the time for it to make this suggestion because it is aware of struggles to discover and resolve ongoing expenses after death. With smartphones ubiquitous, the org fears more people will find themselves unable to resolve their loved ones' digital affairs -- and powerless to stop their credit cards being charged for services the departed cannot consume.

According to Business Insider (paywalled), Microsoft's Copilot tool inadvertently let customers access sensitive information, such as CEO emails and HR documents. Now, Microsoft is working to fix the situation, deploying new tools and a guide to address the privacy concerns. The story was highlighted by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. From the report: These updates are designed "to identify and mitigate oversharing and ongoing governance concerns," the company said in a blueprint for Microsoft's 365 productivity software suite. [...] Copilot's magic -- its ability to create a 10-slide road-mapping presentation, or to summon a list of your company's most profitable products -- works by browsing and indexing all your company's internal information, like the web crawlers used by search engines. IT departments at some companies have set up lax permissions for who can access internal documents -- selecting "allow all" for the company's HR software, say, rather than going through the trouble of selecting specific users.

That didn't create much of a problem because there wasn't a tool that an average employee could use to identify and retrieve sensitive company documents -- until Copilot. As a result, some customers have deployed Copilot only to discover that it can let employees read an executive's inbox or access sensitive HR documents. "Now when Joe Blow logs into an account and kicks off Copilot, they can see everything," a Microsoft employee familiar with customer complaints said. "All of a sudden Joe Blow can see the CEO's emails."

The Verge's Richard Lawler reports: Strava recently informed its users and partners that new terms for its API restrict the data that third-party apps can show, refrain from replicating Strava's look, and place a ban on using data "for any model training related to artificial intelligence, machine learning or similar applications." The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava's own post about the change is dated November 15th.

There are plenty of posts on social media complaining about the sudden shift, but one place where dissent won't be tolerated is Strava's own forums. The company says, "...posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted." Brian Bell, Strava's VP of Communications and Social Impact, said in a statement: "We anticipate that these changes will affect only a small fraction (less than .1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform -- the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed, including coaching platforms focused on providing feedback to users and tools that help users understand their data and performance."

India's competition watchdog has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with other Meta units for advertising purposes for five years and also levied a fine of $25.4 million for antitrust violations related to WhatsApp's controversial 2021 privacy policy. From a report: The Competition Commission of India, which began the investigation in 2021, found that WhatsApp's "take-it-or-leave-it" privacy update constituted an abuse of Meta's dominant position by forcing users to accept expanded data collection without an opt-out option.

WhatsApp's 2021 privacy policy update required users to share their data with Meta companies in order to continue using the messaging service, removing a previous opt-out option that had existed since 2016. The mandatory data-sharing requirement expanded the scope of data collection and processing by Meta's group companies.

The Belgian region of Flanders is rolling out personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a trial of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision for user-controlled data privacy.

Five Belgian hospitals have begun storing patient visit information in the data pods, developed by Berners-Lee's startup Inrupt over the past five years. The system aims to help compliance with European privacy regulations by giving citizens control over their personal information, from medical records to social media posts.

The initiative counters the current internet landscape dominated by major technology companies like Google and Meta, which store user data across their servers. Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, advocates for returning data control to users through decentralized systems rather than leaving it vulnerable to harvesting by tech platforms and governments.

"Here's how Apple's next major product will work," writes Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: The company has been developing a smart home command center that will rival products like the Amazon Echo Hub and Google Nest Hub... The product will run many of Apple's core apps, like Safari, Notes and Calendar, but the interface will be centered on a customizable home screen with iOS-like widgets and smart home controls... The device looks like a low-end iPad and will include a built-in battery, speakers and a FaceTime camera oriented for a horizontal landscape view. The square device, which includes a roughly 6-inch screen, has sensors that let it change the interface depending on how far a user is from the screen. It will also have attachments for walls, plus a base with additional speakers so it can be placed on a table, nightstand or desk.

Apple envisions customers using the device as an intercom, with people FaceTiming each other from different rooms. They'll also be able to pull up home security footage, control their lights, and videoconference with family while cooking in the kitchen. And it will control music throughout the home on HomePod speakers. The device will work with hundreds of HomeKit-compatible items, a lineup that includes third-party switches, lights, fans and other accessories. But the company doesn't plan to roll out a dedicated app store for the product. Given the lack of success with app marketplaces for the Vision Pro, Apple Watch and Apple TV, that's not too surprising.
Looking ahead, the article concludes "The success of this device is still far from assured. Apple's recent track record pushing into new categories has been spotty, and its previous home products haven't been major hits."

But Gurman shares the most interesting part on X.com: If the product does catch on, it will help set the stage for more home devices. Apple is working on a high-end AI companion with a [$1,000] robotic arm and large display that could serve as a follow-up. The company could also put more resources into developing mobile robots, privacy-focused home cameras and speakers. It may even revisit the idea of making an Apple-branded TV set, something it's evaluating. But if the first device fails, Apple may have to rethink its smart home ambitions once again.
Gurman also writes that Apple is also working on a new AirTag with more range and improved privacy features (including "making it more difficult for someone to remove the speaker.")

Google appears to be working on an email-forwarding alias system, according to the blog Android Authority, giving users a new way to "shield" their main email address.

The site performed a teardown on the newest Google Play Services' APK looking for work-in-progress code , and spotted "a whole boatload of strings referencing and in support of something called 'Shielded Email'." Just from that text, we're able to infer quite a lot about what we're looking at here, and it appears that Shielded Email consists of a system to create single-use or limited-use email aliases that will forward messages along to your primary account. And while we could imagine that something like this might be pretty useful in Chrome, here it looks like Google is building it specifically to address apps that ask for your email address. The messages in there touch on a couple reasons beyond spam that you might want to keep your main email private, like reducing the extent to which your online activities can be tracked, and mitigating your personal risk from potential future data breaches.
They also sighted a reference to "Shielded Email" in the Autofill settings menu — though their article acknowledges that even features hinted at by work-in-progress code may not ultimately make it into a public release.

But Forbes suggests that the idea sounds similar to Apple's Hide My Email service, which "provides an automated random email address creator to help keep your personal email address private when subscribing to services."

jojowombl shares a report from The Guardian: Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker -- and not its government customers -- is the party that "installs and extracts" information from mobile phones targeted by the company's hacking software. The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, portions of which were published for the first time on Thursday.

It comes five years after WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, first announced it was filing suit against NSO. The company, which was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2021, makes what is widely considered the world's most sophisticated hacking software, which -- according to researchers -- has been used in the past in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda. [...] At the heart of the legal fight was an allegation by WhatsApp that NSO had long denied: that it was the Israeli company itself, and not its government clients around the world, who were operating the spyware. NSO has always said that its product is meant to be used to prevent serious crime and terrorism, and that clients are obligated not to abuse the spyware. It has also insisted that it does not know who its clients are targeting. [...]

To make its case, WhatsApp was allowed by Judge Phyllis Hamilton to make its case, including citing depositions that have previously been redacted and out of public view. In one, an NSO employee said customers only needed to enter a phone number of the person whose information was being sought. Then, the employee said, "the rest is done automatically by the system." In other words, the process was not operated by customers. Rather NSO alone decided to access WhatsApp's servers when it designed (and continuously upgraded) Pegasus to target individuals' phones. A spokesperson for NSO, Gil Lainer, said in a statement: "NSO stands behind its previous statements in which we repeatedly detailed that the system is operated solely by our clients and that neither NSO nor its employees have access to the intelligence gathered by the system. We are confident that these claims, like many others in the past, will be proven wrong in court, and we look forward to the opportunity to do so."

Chinese hackers, reportedly linked to a Chinese intelligence agency, breached T-Mobile as part of a broader cyber-espionage campaign targeting telecom companies to spy on high-value intelligence targets. "T-Mobile is closely monitoring this industry-wide attack, and at this time, T-Mobile systems and data have not been impacted in any significant way, and we have no evidence of impacts to customer information," a company spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Reuters reports: It was unclear what information, if any, was taken about T-Mobile customers' calls and communications records, according to the report. On Wednesday, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. cyber watchdog agency CISA said China-linked hackers have intercepted surveillance data intended for American law enforcement agencies after breaking into an unspecified number of telecom companies. Further reading: U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack

An update to OpenAI's ChatGPT app for macOS adds integration with third-party apps, including developer tools such as VS Code, Terminal, iTerm2 and Apple's Xcode. 9to5Mac reports: In a demo seen by 9to5Mac, ChatGPT was able to understand code from an Xcode project and then provide code suggestions without the user having to manually copy and paste content into the ChatGPT app. It can even read content from more than one app at the same time, which is very useful for working with developer tools. According to OpenAI, the idea is to expand integration to more apps in the future. For now, integration with third-party apps is coming exclusively to the Mac version of ChatGPT, but there's another catch. The feature requires a paid ChatGPT subscription, at least for now.

ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers will receive access to integration with third-party apps on macOS starting today, while access for Enterprise and Education users will be rolled out "in the next few weeks." OpenAI told 9to5Mac that it wants to make the feature available to everyone in the future, although there's no estimate of when this will happen. For privacy reasons, users can control at any time when and which apps ChatGPT can read. The app can be downloaded here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media.

The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country.

"It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...]

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras.

People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.

Qwant, France's privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. TechCrunch: The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines -- including and especially around generative AI -- as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing's search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google's search results. Rising API costs are one clear motivator for the move to shrink this Big Tech dependency, with Microsoft massively hiking prices for Bing's search APIs last year.

Neither Ecosia nor Qwant will stop using Bing or Google altogether. However, they aim to diversify the core tech supporting their services with their own index. It will lower their operational costs, and serve as a technical base to fuel their own product development as GenAI technologies take up a more central role in many consumer-facing digital services. Both search engines have already dabbled in integrating GenAI features. Expect more on this front, although they aren't planning to develop AI model development themselves. They say they will continue to rely on API access to major platforms' large language models (LLMs) to power these additions. The pair is also open to other European firms joining in with their push for more tech stack sovereignty -- at least as fellow customers for the search index, as they plan to license access via an API. Other forms of partnership could be considered too, they told TechCrunch.

With iOS 18.2, Apple will allow you to share the location of a lost AirTag with other people and with more than 15 different airlines. The Verge reports: When using the feature, you can generate a Share Item Location link within the Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Once you share the link with someone, they can click on it to view an interactive map with the location of your lost item. Apple will update the website automatically when the lost item moves, and it will also display a timestamp when it moved last. Apple will turn off the feature once you find your lost item. You can also manually stop sharing the location of an AirTag at any time, or the link will "automatically expire after seven days." [...]

As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to "privately and securely" accept links to lost items, as "access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address." This feature will be available to airlines in the "coming months." Additionally, SITA, a baggage tracing solution, will also implement Share Item Location into its luggage tracker.

A new article at Reason.com argues that U.S. courts "are coming for digital libraries." In September, a federal appeals court dealt a major blow to the Internet Archive — one of the largest online repositories of free books, media, and software — in a copyright case with significant implications for publishers, libraries, and readers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that found the Internet Archive's huge, digitized lending library of copyrighted books was not covered by the "fair use" doctrine and infringed on the rights of publishers. Agreeing with the Archive's interpretation of fair use "would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners' exclusive right to prepare derivative works," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "Were we to approve [Internet Archive's] use of the works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay publishers for content they could access for free."
Others disagree, according to some links shared in a recent email from the Internet Archive. Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis argues the court's logic renders the fair use doctrine "almost unusuable". And that's just the beginning... This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities' reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach.
But lawyer/librarian Kyle K. Courtney writes that the case "is specific only to the parties, and does not impact the other existing versions of controlled digital lending." Additionally, this decision is limited to the 2nd Circuit and is not binding anywhere else — in other words, it does not apply to the 47 states outside the 2nd Circuit's jurisdiction. In talking with colleagues in the U.S. this week and last, many are continuing their programs because they believe their digital loaning programs fall outside the scope of this ruling... Moreover, the court's opinion focuses on digital books that the court said "are commercially available for sale or license in any electronic text format." Therefore, there remains a significant number of materials in library collections that have not made the jump to digital, nor are likely to, meaning that there is no ebook market to harm — nor is one likely to emerge for certain works, such as those that are no longer commercially viable...

This case represents just one instance in an ongoing conversation about library lending in the digital age, and the possibility of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court means the final outcome is far from settled.
Some more quotes from links shared by Internet Archive:

• "It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped." — TechDirt

• "The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few." — blogger Hannah Williams

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

On its 20th anniversary, Firefox "is still going strong, and it is a better browser today than it ever was," according to TechCrunch.

In an interview, Mozilla's interim CEO says one of the first things they did when was to "unlock a bunch of money towards Firefox product development... I've been in enough places where people tend to forget about the core business, and they stop investing in it, because they get distracted by shiny things — and then they regret it." "Firefox is incredibly important, and it is our core. We've actually put more investment into it this year and into connecting with our communities, into bringing out and testing features that are positive and creating good experiences for folks. That's been a huge priority for me and for the company this year, and it's showing up in the results."

She acknowledged that Mozilla doesn't have the device distribution that benefits many of Firefox's competitors, especially on mobile, but she did note that the Digital Marks Act (DMA) in Europe — which means Apple, for example, has to provide a browser choice screen on iOS — is working. "With the DMA, even though the implementation hasn't been outstanding, we're seeing a real shift. When people have the choice to choose Firefox, they're choosing Firefox," she said...

To kick-start some of this growth, Mozilla is looking at reaching new, and younger, users. Chambers noted that Mozilla is running a number of marketing campaigns to make people aware of Firefox, especially those who are only now starting to make their first browser choices. With them, she believes, Mozilla's messaging around privacy lands especially well.
In a future where browsers include AI agents that take actions on behalf of users, there might be more confidence in a browser designed for privacy and transparency, the interim CEO points out — as part of their larger mission. "What I love about Firefox is that it really provides users with an alternative choice of a browser that is just genuinely designed for them.

"We have, from its very inception and throughout, really wanted to create a browser that prioritizes people over profit, prioritizes privacy over anything else, and to have that option, the choice."