Starting in Firefox 138, Mozilla started gating Firefox Labs features behind data collection.
Mozilla had announced that some new Firefox features would be released via Firefox Labs.
It is now a few hours since I posted, and there is reason to celebrate – Mozilla is updating Firefox Labs to let people access features without needing to enable data collection.
European companies and governments regrettably aren’t better, they simply don’t have that many eyes on them because, well, they don’t have much to show for to begin with. Name a production-ready made-in-Europe browser/browser-engine. Name a widespread European messenger. A European smartphone platform? European Facebook or Twitter? Anything?
Even the few small scale European examples that you might come up with had an absurd amount of controversy to them. Remember that Tutanota thing? Remember Chat Control?
The reason people believe that Europe is so much more privacy respecting than the US is simply because there aren’t many services to exercise the same level of invasive, authoritarian control over than in the US. If 60% of the world however would be using a Nokia minäPuhelin you would see the same, if not worse, privacy-invasive regulation and controversy popping off every other week.
Right… in fact if you look deep down within a TSMC chip you can see an ASML fueled IP on how to spy on people. /s
I think you are muddying the water with unrelated (albeit legitimates) problems (e.g. court order or political proposal vs actual regulation on all companies, EU ones included) and total speculation on what you imagine would happen if the world was different.
The Brussels effect make the world better even if the EU was not even well intentioned in the first place or didn’t actually build anything.