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Julien Voisin blogs:
Today, I updated my Firefox, and had a new icon on my toolbar: pocket. I took at quick look at the ToS and privacy policy; here is my tl;dr:
Read it Later, Inc. is collecting a lot of intimate information and is tracking you.
When you share something through Pocket with a friend, the emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques to track your friends.
They are sharing those information with trusted third parties (Could be anyone they are doing business with.).
The policy might change, and it's your responsibility to check Pocket's website to see if it has.
[...] The Pocket implementation is not an extension (while it was available as an extension), it's implemented in Firefox. You can not remove it, only disable it, by going in about:config, since this option is not available in the preferences menu.
What the hell is pocket? on Mozilla's site:
The Pocket for Firefox button lets you save web pages and videos to Pocket in just one click. Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket app. All you need is a free account, an Internet connection and the Pocket button.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 13 2015, @12:58PM
The technology is old. I remember an addon for my palm pilot III in '98 or so that did the same deal, download a web page and put it on a hand held device with some reformatting for later viewing. The problem is there was nothing I knew now that I wanted to download and look at an old version of in the future, and if there is anything like that it would probably be a PDF on dropbox, anyway. Since then the idea won't die, its a moth to the flame because its so easy to implement technologically, yet so useless. I predict this technology will continue to be re-invented and pushed for as long as we still have hand held media consumption devices.
The business model of monitoring everything you do with it and sell the data to the highest bidder is somewhat new when combined with the above, so that is "startup innovative", however unsavory.
There is an interesting marketing aspect that its easy to come up with historical events where, if I could predict the future, I'd have saved something for later portable viewing. Well, not many events but it has happened. So sell that experience as why you need it today, ignoring the little problem of needing to be able to predict the future.