Firefox Advance - Experimental recommendation engine built into Firefox

This is next level ad retargeting. So many people are concerned with privacy and security. Personally, I would avoid this as the benefit < risk, for me.

1. I think people are over hyping the concern. It's opt-in. 2. The data is containerized from the notes, that it's only page aware. 3. Really? Facebook and Google and the like deploy hundreds or thumbprint techniques without telling us, the moment we have a company transparent about what they're doing it's too much?

Firefox's Pocket (a tool to save articles for later) acquisition is making a ton of sense now. I've been loving the Pocket-recommended articles directly inside every new Firefox tab, which are based on articles that are popular with the overall Pocket userbase. Firefox Advance takes one step further, using Pocket's training data and every article that YOU personally view on the internet to recommend more #content. First scalable way around Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social network traffic moats I've seen in a while. 👏👏

Personally, I am fine if people know what I read if it means better content. The constant barrage of irrelevant information is much more of a struggle for me than hyper-targeted ads I rarely spend time/money looking at.

This looks really cool honestly and like something that would come in handy when doing online research BUT what about privacy? I mean Mozilla is an advocate of online privacy, they make extensions like the Facebook container and write relevant articles on their blog but then they release something like this? I have to look more into it, perhaps it's not account based but rather recommends related articles only based on the article you're reading and doesn't keep any history records. That could be possible if they leverage Pocket's database to make recommendations and then offer them to non Pocket users without tracking them.

I need this, seriously, because in my old sites, which I visit almost every day, I do not even notice new and interesting web pages. This is Perfect.

As a work utility, this will come very handy for research (e.g. on a sanitized machine). However, as a consumer app, the 3rd party partnership and type of data being sent is enough to give pause. Case-in-point: (from the testpilot lander) "Laserlike also receives your IP addresses, dates/timestamps, and time spent on webpages. This data is used to index URLs publicly visible on the web." Kudos for the full transparency/disclosure, though.

I am still annoyed with how FF left us out in the dark with our Add-ons being disabled overnight with no option to use them..

Is this just going to be a article chum churning or be like similarsites that shows rare sites of the same theme?