Mozilla: These Are the Tech Gifts Privacy-Conscious Shoppers Should Avoid

The Mozilla Foundation has updated its Privacy Not Included(Opens in a new window) gift guide for the holidays, and once again it’s more of a guide about what tech gifts not to give if the purchaser or recipient value their privacy.

The list that the non-profit behind the Firefox browser started compiling in 2017(Opens in a new window) now covers more than 90 gadgets, unpacking their privacy risks and, less often, advantages in chatty essays. Busy readers will want to skip to the lists at the bottom that itemize how each device collects data, how the company uses that data and how you can control the data, and whether the product meets Mozilla’s minimum security standards(Opens in a new window) (for instance, by encrypting data and providing automatic security patches).

The worst products come with an alert upfront, in the form of a yellow “Warning: *privacy not included with this product” banner. Visitors can also cast their own vote by moving a slider from “Not creepy” to “Super creepy.”

For example, the Meta Quest Pro augmented- and virtual-reality headset from Facebook’s parent company gets one of those warnings in a review(Opens in a new window) that denounces the profusion of cameras inside and out this $1,500 headset (without really discussing their unavoidability in a product that has to recreate your facial expressions to other virtual-world occupants). 

The assessment, as previewed by Mozilla PR, also takes a whack at Meta for drowning the user in click-to-agree documents–14 in all, for an estimated 37,700 words total. 

The Amazon Echo Dot(Opens in a new window) gets another such warning in an evaluation(Opens in a new window) that emphasizes how this smart speaker ties into Amazon’s core function of selling you more stuff: “Amazon doesn’t need to sell your data to others when they have their own advertising and retail juggernaut to use your data to sell you more stuff.”

Some products, however, get a thumbs-up from Mozilla’s researchers. They approved Sonos’ smart-speaker lineup(Opens in a new window), commending the on-device processing of your speech done by such devices as the $400 Sonos Move.

”So, when you ask Sonos to play Taylor Swift’s new album over and over using their Sonos voice assistant, no one hears that but you.” This review does, however, note that no such protections apply if you use Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, also options on these gadgets. 

Alas, Privacy Not Included readers do not seem to have been persuaded by this praise, rating Sonos smart speakers “Somewhat creepy” anyway.