Privacy browser Waterfox appears to be sold to System1, a U.S. pay-per-click ad company that recently bought a majority of the Startpage search engine
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/f3gqoc/privacy_browser_waterfox_appears_to_be_sold_to/
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Waterfox has been sold to an AD company, System1
- This topic has 25 replies, 17 voices, and was last updated 5 years ago.
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Alex5723, thank you for passing this on!
To me, this is both interesting and a bit worrying, although it might not mean that much. It is a note from someone reporting some indirect evidence that, for all this person knows, such a deal might have taken place, but offering no hard evidence as the “smoking gun.” I am not sure what is the connection between this forum at “old.reditt”, where the note has been posted, and plain old “reddit” Because “plain old reddit” is not my first, or even my last source of information.
I don’t expect such a deal, if it has been really made, to be announced in the front page of the “Wall Street Journal, or in any page of the WSJ for that matter, but looking around the Web in all the usual places dealing with “Tech” something more solid might pop up. Or not.
I have “Waterfox” as my default browser in my Win 7 PC and in my newish Mac. I also have FF and Chrome (as well as poor old IE 11, no longer in use). Of the first three mentioned, Waterfox has been the most satisfactory, so it is now, as it has been for quite a while now, the default one. Same as the other two, it can be used in both Windows and Linux PCs as well as in Macs and I have it in all three.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV2 users thanked author for this post.
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“Startpage BV was acquired by the Privacy One Group, owned by adtech company System1 in October 2019, leading to privacy concerns.”
“It appears that the Waterfox web browser has been sold to System1 recently, the same company that bought the Startpage search engine some time ago. To be precise, Startpage was bought by Privacy One Group Ltd which System1 owns. System1 is an advertising company that tries to “make advertising better and safer, while respecting consumer privacy”.
I used StartPage until the sale. I now use DuckDuckGo. I’ve never used Waterfox, I’m using Firefox 73.0.
Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.We were all once "Average Users".1 user thanked author for this post.
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if it has been really made, to be announced in the front page of the “Wall Street Journal, or in any page of the WSJ for that matter
Just like buying Startpage wasn’t on the front page, buying Waterfox isn’t such a big news.
Have you read this ?
Support Waterfox
If you’d really like to help Waterfox out, please consider using the default search (Bing) with adblock disabled on it, it would be such a huge show of support! The default search is fairly privacy friendly.
https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-2020.02-release/
For a privacy minded browser I would expected the default search engine to be DuckDuckGo and not Microsoft harvesting data Bing.
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On the question of ‘support’: I give practical support to what I consider worth supporting by annually donating money to it, but in no other way. Wikipedia is in my list, Waterfox too, as is AskWoody — and other deserving causes. And I use Waterfox because, so far, I have not had a reason not to. If this were to change, I would seriously consider using something else as my default browser — as long as it is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Any recommendations?
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV2 users thanked author for this post.
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On the question of ‘support’: I give practical support to what I consider worth supporting by annually donating money to it, but in no other way.
I’ve contributed to Waterfox (via “buy me a coffee”) too, though I would not use Bing with adblocking off. I don’t mind that Alex suggested using Bing. It would be different if there was no choice, but just as Firefox’s default Google can be changed, so can Waterfox’s default of Bing. I certainly liked it better when WF partnered with Ecosia, but it’s kind of like Woody here before he went subscriber-supported only… he had ads from the big guys, not because he approved of their business practices, but because that was what he had to do to keep the site afloat at that time. The big guys have absorbed, displaced, or destroyed all the smaller players, so it’s difficult to try to promote privacy in a web built on spying when you’re a little guy who can’t call the shots.
As imperfect as it may be to have Waterfox partnering with an ad company (if I recall, Alex takes issue with that, saying that it’s a search syndicator, not an ad company), it’s better to partner with one whose business model hinges on privacy than one like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., that is based on spying. The whole reason startpage.com exists is to shield the user from Google spying. If it merely substituted one spymaster for another, there would be no reason for anyone to use it instead of the actual Google. This gives the System 1 people an incentive to respect privacy. It’s their niche in the market, and if it were to become known that they’re spying too, it would all be over for them. That may well come to pass, for all I know, but it means that there is at least an incentive for them to not do what Google is doing.
It’s been an assumption that advertising = massive spying for years, but there was a time, not long ago, when advertising didn’t involve spying. When I used to read paper magazines, they had lots of ads, but those ads never tracked how long I spent looking at them or assembled a dossier on which articles I had read or which other ads I had spent some time perusing. Ads of that type are completely passive, and for most of the history of advertising, that’s how they have been. The effectiveness of such ads was measured in increased sales, or the lack thereof. That’s what really mattered to the advertisers, and it had been that way since before any of us was born. Advertising could be annoying, and frequently was, but it didn’t spy on us. Radio ads didn’t spy on us, TV ads didn’t spy on us, flyers in the mail didn’t spy on us, billboards by the side of the highway or on the sides of buses didn’t spy on us. Ads were everywhere, and while they were often ugly and annoying, they didn’t spy on us.
Of course, those old-school ads never spied on us because they couldn’t. Ad rates for newspapers and magazines were based on circulation figures and broad demographics, which was a very coarse level of information. With computers, though (including mobile devices), suddenly very granular, detailed information about each individual viewer is feasible in a way that ad execs from a few decades ago could never have imagined. In less than 20 years, we’ve gotten to the point where we hear “advertising” and immediately we think of massive spy networks that seek to know every single thing about each person in the world. That’s where the web as envisioned by Google, Facebook, et al, has gotten us.
While the spy giants will disagree, it’s simply not true to say that advertising requires a massive spying apparatus that makes the US NSA look like dabblers by comparison. That’s only been the definition of “advertising” for a short time, while the non-spying variety of advertising has been with us as long as the concept of money, in one form or another. I’ve often replied to the people demanding that all of us web users turn off our adblockers, to the effect that if there were ads like those I mentioned above, that didn’t try to track me in any way, that didn’t blink or animate or make noise or cover up part of the content I’d come to see, I’d certainly reconsider. Ads are annoying, but being expected to run massive scripts on my PC whose function is deliberately hidden from me, and where that function is almost certainly against my interests, is much worse than a simple obnoxious print ad in a magazine I like. Get back to those kinds of ads and I might actually consider unblocking a few more sites.
All of the ad giants pretend to favor privacy, but actions speak louder that press releases. It’s possible that some companies out there recognize that there is a market in ads that don’t track anyone. If there are, I don’t want to paint them with the same brush as I do Google and Facebook. Is System1 one of those? I don’t know, but I’ve never heard of them before this thing with Waterfox. I’m willing to give them a chance to not disappoint me.
Remember, the celebrated Brave browser that was just declared the most private browser of all the ones tested by that Irish computer science professor is itself the product of an advertising company, and I don’t mean the Google Chromium engine that forms its base. Brave itself maintains its own ad network too. Privacy and ads don’t have to be a contradiction.
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A proxy doesn’t make any difference. You connect to DDG via https and then they search on your behalf and return the results via https. Your ISP can’t see anything apart from a connection to DDG or SP.
cheers, Paul
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This is Alex’s response to the news leaks: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/.
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Thanks for the link @matthew – an interesting background source, which includes in the summary:
System1
The elephant in the room. System1 has been to Waterfox a search syndication partner. Essentially a way to have a search engine partnership (such as Bing) is through them, because companies such as Microsoft are too big and too busy to talk to small players such as Waterfox. Before them, it was Ecosia, Startpage etc. It’s probably the one easy way a browser can make money without doing anything dodgy, and it’s a way I’ve been happy to do it without having to compromise Waterfox (and will be the same way System1 makes money from Waterfox – nothing else). People also don’t seem to understand what System1 does and assume the worst (I suppose understandable).. It’s a company that is pivoting to more privacy oriented products, due to the changing landscape. Understandable.It is good to see that Alex remains on board (“they were buying into me and my knowledge more so than they were investing in Waterfox”). It will be interesting to see future developments.
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Hi
My first post to AskWoody, hopefully not my last …
I have an occasional Community Support role in the support area – /r/waterfox – in Reddit. I’m here now to share personal opinion (not here as an official representative, or anything like that).
Given the toxicity of some of what was written elsewhere, things here are a breath of fresh air. Sincerely; it’s so refreshing to find level-headed, polite differences of opinion
This is Alex’s response to the news leaks: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/.
For anyone who might have missed the related discussion:
– quite noisy, with occasional high running of emotions but all quiet now, touch wood.
Less noisily
From my point of view, the most succinct summary might be these two sentences from Alex (and the surrounding commentary) – his maintaining control of the future of Waterfox:
“… That’s why I have a contract with them, to run Waterfox. There’s no benefit to them buying Waterfox and running it into the ground.”
Peace
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As I wrote on Reddit (which I only use occasionally),,,
I think something like this had to happen. I’ve been one of Waterfox’s biggest boosters here on AskWoody, and I’ve also expressed my concern on numerous occasions about its future (and that of Mozilla, without whom Waterfox would not exist). It’s very common for one-person projects like Waterfox to disappear when the developer burns out, like what happened with the Classic Shell dev (meaning the burning out part, not that it has ceased to be, fortunately). As Firefox diverges more and more from where it was when Waterfox (now Waterfox Classic) forked, the workload to backport just the security fixes grows quickly, and even then, it’s a static product in terms of its features and the web standards it supports, which will grow more and more antiquated over time.
It’s too much work for one person to handle.
It would have been nice if some other entity had stepped forward to help with the nuts and bolts work of backporting the security fixes, but if that has happened, I have not heard about it. It would also have been nice if there could have been a joint project between Pale Moon and Waterfox, but even though the two projects look similar on the surface, there are a lot of philosophical differences underneath. As it stood prior to the involvement with System 1, I don’t see any way it could have continued indefinitely.
Now the project has some corporate money behind it, and people are suspicious. Those who are already saying “Well, goodbye Waterfox, it was nice while it lasted” are jumping the gun. If they object to simply being associated with an ad company… well, what do they propose to move to? Chrome? Chromium? Brave? Opera? Vivaldi? Chredge? All of them are built on code developed by Google. Firefox gets most of its funding from Google too. If you demand ad-company purity, your choices are, and have been for a while, quite limited.
I don’t know what the future holds now that System 1 is on board, but I do know that I don’t see Waterfox’s ultimate collapse as a certainty. That was the only outcome I could see before System 1. Someone had to get on board and share the burden. It was either going to be that or crashing and burning, and if there were other offers, again, I am not aware of them.
People who think that it could just keep going the way it was forever were a bit too optimistic in their thinking, and now those who have turned to naysayers have turned too pessimistic. We don’t know what will happen. None of us does. Waterfox remains open-source, though, and if System 1 wants to mold Waterfox into a spyware vehicle, there’s nothing stopping anyone from forking it and backing all of that nasty stuff out, just as Brave and others have done with Chromium. All it takes is for someone to actually do it. The same’s true right now, and for the time being, the only one who stepped up is System 1. Alex says it’s a good deal, and he created the thing we’re talking about. He knows more about how close he was to the end of his abilities than any of us.
I, for one, don’t care about the ideological purity of any given browser. I’d consider a Chromium-based product if it did what I want a browser to do. I’ll keep using the browser that meets my needs the best. In that way, nothing has changed. It’s Waterfox Classic as first choice, Firefox second, Vivaldi third. A slight change in any of them could change the ranking, but for now, that’s what it is.
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samak ( #2177942 ): I might try Pale Moon, except that there is no version, as yet, for Macs. There have been several promises being made, for some time now, of a Mac’s version, but, as far as I know, this one has not materialized yet. I understand that there is a version for Windows and another for Linux. Waterfox has versions for all three systems and works fine, so far, in all three.
And I agree with Ascaris comments, posted earlier in this same thread, that we just have to wait and see, because there is no clear reason to either start worrying, or to forget completely about the possible implications of the recent change of ownership.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV2 users thanked author for this post.
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Pale Moon
… no version, as yet, for Macs. There have been several promises being made, for some time now, of a Mac’s version, but, as far as I know, this one has not materialized yet. …
I occasionally used New Moon www/palemoon for FreeBSD – until the port was deleted (237107 – www/palemoon: update or remove port). From the former maintainer:
>> … My current employer causes me to not using FreeBSD at daily basis (in contrast, contributing to another package manager called vcpkg), so I could not priorities things on FreeBSD.
>> Meanwhile, if someone else would like to upgrade it and/or take the maintainership, you are welcome.
Whilst I’m a member of Pale Moon Forum, I’m not familiar with any developer’s intention. I’m there only occasionally to listen in. The sometimes catty remarks (there, I meowed), and so on.
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I might try Pale Moon, except that there is no version, as yet, for Macs. There have been several promises being made, for some time now, of a Mac’s version, but, as far as I know, this one has not materialized yet.
The person who used to build Mac versions of Pale Moon no longer has the time, there has been another person who’s building PM for Mac but it’s still considered a test/beta version and doesn’t carry the Pale Moon branding.
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Waterfox
… backporting the security fixes …
Re: back-porting generally, I sensed the beginning of a significant leap in coding activity a few months ago.
For now, I’ll not point to that time in the repo. After Alex’s announcement re: funding and a team, I did wonder whether the past surge in activity was from the person who is now ‘on team’. However the surge began some time before the December 2019 change of Director of Waterfox Ltd – so I’m speculating … and excessive/wild/ridiculous speculation has been a curse in Reddit and elsewhere, so I’ll curb myself.
System1
I do understand why people will dislike things such as the (award-winning) marketing technology that’s associated with System1. Some such organisations are far worse; some are better. I can’t describe System1 as mid-ground, but from the little that I have seen – I’m still gathering information, slowly – there is evidence of people taking steps in the right direction. Doing good things. Steps away from the aspects of online advertising and tracking that people, like me, dislike or deplore. Good things but of course, for some people: good will never be good enough.
I do see that System1 is extraordinarily well-placed to raise the profiles of diverse brands and businesses. On this subject, I might post something to Reddit next week.
Startpage.com
I agree wholeheartedly with what someone wrote in December: “… it’s a shame that this company which has done such good work for users is being dragged through the mud.“. Re: https://old.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/f30vu5/-/fjigxkx/ before too long there should be a blog post – a transcript of the recent interview with the CEO.
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In his blog post https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ the developer seems to say Waterfox never was a privacy browser. I don’t see a benefit of Waterfox Current (the version that does not use the old extensions) over using Ghacks user.js with Firefox. But I know people who don’t like choices Mozilla is making and if Waterfox gives some people the trust and software to not increase the monopoly of Chrome that is a great thing.
On the other hand, most popular browser extensions have received offers to be bought by unrecognized companies, and when Stylish was bought it took some bad actions, so I can see why people would want reassurance. And everyone is more on edge after learning about Avast and Jumpshot.
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In his blog post https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/ the developer seems to say Waterfox never was a privacy browser. …
Yeah, the uses of such phrases – by people other than Alex – might have been well-intended, however things quickly became somewhat twisted. Highly emotive, when a person is passionate about doing good and then (I believe) mis-portrayed as doing bad.
Key phrases, I think it’s fair to use these:
- privacy-friendly
- balanced.
Phrases such as privacy browser, privacy product and privacy tool might apply to things such as Tor Browser (am I correct to assume this?); quite different from the position of Waterfox.
Without wishing to dredge up emotive conversations, two points in time might be of particular interest. From twenty-three days ago, with added emphasis:
… it’s still all very personal.
One thing I will never do is compromise the user, and I think the last decade has proven that, so there’s no reason to believe that will change.
… I’d like to reiterate that I’ve always had Waterfox be privacy friendly, and I’ve always tried to make it balanced (as I’ve mentioned it before). But it’s unfair to expect it to be on the level of something like Tor – they’re just different beasts. …
– and from twenty-two days ago:
… another problem. Waterfox *is not a privacy product*. I’ve never touted it as such. Privacy conscious? Yes. A product no! People used Waterfox because it doesn’t collect telemetry or data, and has sane default settings. You’ve branded Waterfox as a privacy product and have in effect caused a storm over something that hasn’t even changed.
… a witch hunt – and once more the companies aren’t getting affected, I am. You could do real damage one day to a person you know? This has all been in very poor taste.
HTH
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… actions speak louder that press releases. It’s possible that some companies out there recognize that there is a market in ads that don’t track anyone. … Is System1 one of those? I don’t know, …
Neither do I. I should probably say yes, and no, and methodically, positively shifting:
- yes, in that System1 can raise the profile of a premier privacy search engine
- no, in that a different System1 service uses a Facebook tracker (as defined by Mozilla’s Facebook Container extension)
– I plan to make an enhancement request, but not until after a couple of obscure, unrelated issues are resolved. As far as I can tell: the affected service does not position itself as a privacy service, so use of a Facebook tracker is debatably a non-issue, but I reckon that System1 will take a balanced suggestion on board.
Of course, those two points are cherry-picked. Lazy oversimplification by me. A more detailed discussion could be sprawling, and I don’t want to get into that.
(For the benefit of drive-by conspiracy theorists: the Facebook tracker situation is entirely unrelated to Startpage.com or Waterfox.)
… willing to give them a chance to not disappoint me. …
+1
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