The right to be let alone

Right now, the default Firefox home page says:

"Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, is a non-profit and we rely on donations. If everyone reading this donates $3 before the year ends, you help Mozilla protect our fundamental right to online privacy in 2014."

What it doesn't say:

"The Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox, is a for-profit corporation. The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit, receives all of the Corporation's profits. Most of this revenue comes from Google. The amount of revenue that the Mozilla Foundation receives from individual donations is tiny compared to what the Foundation receives from the Corporation, which in turn is received from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine in Firefox."

Perhaps there are other examples, but I don't know of a single other nonprofit organization that is actively soliciting donations from individuals and is the sole shareholder of an extremely profitable for-profit corporation. Whether or not you think Mozilla is protecting anyone's right to privacy, there are probably better places to donate your money if you have a limited budget for charity. For example:

• The National Network of Abortion Funds helps protect the fundamental right to privacy specifically with respect to what goes in inside your own body.
  
• The Ada Initiative is helping protect women's fundamental right to be full participants in the economy.
  
• Partners in Health is helping protect everyone's fundamental right to the same kind of health care that a person working in Silicon Valley as a software engineer would expect.
  
• Scarleteen is helping youth access accurate information about how their bodies work.
  
• Lyon-Martin Health Services is providing health care to trans women, trans men, non-binary trans people, and cis women (with a specific emphasis on queer women), regardless of ability to pay.
  
• The Transgender, Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project is addressing the needs of trans women of color who are disproportionally targeted by the criminal justice system.
  

I guess you could also think about whether an organization that stands behind its employees who are harassers and homophobes, but not its employees who are LGBTQ, is an organization you want defending your privacy rights... but, of course, that depends very much on who you are and the specific ways in which your privacy is under attack. Is your privacy more threatened by the NSA, by advertisers, by the criminal justice system, by the ongoing war on bodily autonomy for anyone who's not a cis man, by lack of access to health care (or to respectful health care), or by people who don't want you to work in your vocation because of your gender or your sexual orientation? Of course, the answer might be "all of the above", in which case you may want to ask which organizations demonstrate that they see the connections between all of these threats to our freedom.