this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.