• Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?

    My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?

    • Mr. Satan@monyet.cc
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      2 months ago

      In IT context local is a well establised term. It’s either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.

      The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone’s local computer.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 months ago

      If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

      Then that would also be an oxymoron.

      Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.

        • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 months ago

          This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users’ computers.

          It is absolutely doublespeak to call it “local”. Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.

          Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers “locally hosted”. It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.

          • LWD@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            We actually do have better terminology for “local to Mozilla” and “remote to Mozilla”… It’s first party and third party.

            And, from the looks of it, Mozilla is indeed using Google Cloud Services as a third party, according to their privacy policy.

            • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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              2 months ago

              That’s a given. Google Cloud Platform is managed through the same Google Cloud Console as everything else, which is in Google’s datacenter, even when it it’s running locally - unless you opt for an air-gapped option. It’s how companies can make data locality claims while using the same tools and one of the selling points pushed by cloud services.