• @GenderNeutralBro
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    23 months ago

    Why does local mean local? I’m not sure I understand your question.

    • @Bitrot
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      3 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
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        53 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.

        • @Bitrot
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          33 months ago

          Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.

            • @Bitrot
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              43 months ago

              And what term might be used to describe the location of the datacenter down the hall, that is not used to describe the one across the country? It’s pretty standard in IT, but also used outside of IT by normal people for things such as describing a pub.

      • @LWD@lemm.ee
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        43 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
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        43 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
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          3 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
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            3 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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              23 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
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                3 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.