Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable. I still haven't forgotten the entire Brendan Eich fiasco. Who is to say that extremely politically motivated folks at Mozilla may consider it their duty to expose user(s) in a similar way? How can they purport to be a champion of user privacy after what they did to Brendan Eich?
What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted.
This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open source code, that Mozilla would be collecting any information like this.
The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument.
I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are still part of the organization.
Due to that, I am out. I should state that, politically speaking, I was not in solidarity with Eich's position. I am opposed to what people at Mozilla did.
>The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it.
How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?
Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].
In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?
> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic
That's a strange way of referring to having someone run an organization who actively works to curtail the human rights of some of his employees. And said employees and their supporters speaking out against that.
I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.
They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.
It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.
Signed,
a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.
Doxing is publishing PII. Political donations are NOT PII and are in fact supposed to be public. It is completely legitimate for a CEO's political donations to be scrutinized.
> Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable
I thought you were going to mention the betrayal that caused a lot of ppl to switch (other than the slowness, inferior default tooling, etc). The deal with yahoo. Same thing that soured me on Java. If you're just going to sell out to maintain a company, because you can't support what you built, maybe you overbuilt. Or maybe it's just greed. Either way, never going back.
What did they do exactly? I'm reasonably familiar with the story, but wasn't aware of Mozilla breaching his privacy. Do you just mean the act of speaking out against him in a public way?
He made a publicly recorded donation of $1,000 to oppose same sex marriage. Mozilla employees spoke out against his fitness to run a diverse organization. He resigned.
The only real black eye for Mozilla in this story is that they promoted him at all. If he's just some dude that does his own work, doesn't manage people, and keeps his mouth shut, then, maybe you let his abhorrent opinion slide. But, he was literally the CEO and would make decisions that would impact lots of people.
