I mean people freaking out about this don’t actually understand what’s happening and why Mozilla is doing it. Mozilla is trying to build a new privacy-based advertising. The feature needs to be opt-in by default in order to have a chance to become mainstream. Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is. Most people don’t change default settings. So they can never get websites to try this better technology if their own users aren’t adopting it.
I also hate the attitude of this community they think Firefox is built for them(ultra tech savy, extremely privacy concious) when 99% of their users are not these things. If you want ultra privacy, go use Libreawolf or whatever. Those solutions are for that type of person. Firefox and Mozilla builds for the average person, which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the feature. (Anyone says otherwise is in a tech bubble and haven’t seen normal people interacting with their computers).
Privacy based advertizing:
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Develop ad
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Think about what websites your target demographic will probably frequent. (Be creative, dear marketing person! You can do it! This is the essence of what you’re getting paid for!)
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Pay those sites to display your ad
Done.
Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is.
No. Why? It’s simple. They are collecting data I don’t want the ad networks to have instead of the ad networks and give it to the ad networks. That’s only more private than the status quo if I’m okay with them to have this data and trust them to handle it responsibly. Which I have no reason to.
which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the Feature.
See explanation above. That’s not too complicated to explain to a person that managed to turn on the computer. It only gets complicated when you try to follow the mental gymnastics you need to think this feature adds privacy for anybody.
This exactly. We don’t need some in-between “compromise”.
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99% of their users are not these things
I don’t think so. People using Firefox are freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy. And if Firefox should lose those people, it will truly be the end
FF users include both normal people and freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy.
99% was referring to them not being both tech savy and extremely privacy conscious. I don’t disagree that the appeal of Firefox is better privacy. I just don’t think the average user is looking to absolutely remove every drop of data collected. I mean just look at the default Firefox homepage it comes with. It has sponsored shortcuts and sponsored stories. They put them there because the average user actually clicks on them. If everyone was privacy conscious like you say, they would turn off the feature and Firefox wouldn’t keep it because they don’t make money from it. But that’s obviously not the case.
And these days, privacy is basically the only appeal of Firefox. It’s slower than chrome or webkit based browsers, hangs out with Safari in terms of standards support, and can’t hold a candle to either other browser when it comes to battery life. Why mozilla seems determined to throw that all away is beyond me
It’s slower than chrome or webkit based browsers, hangs out with Safari in terms of standards support, and can’t hold a candle to either other browser when it comes to battery life.
Sources?
The last time I looked at performance and energy benchmarks Firefox was winning.
Does Firefox explain what measures they’ve taken to protect their aggregation servers? If so, this is a perfectly fine and practical method for privacy preservation
Looks like they are using a Prio based protocol. If they are using Prio2+, I think this article is likely overblown. EDIT: I mixed up my sources - Mozilla tested Prio for telemetry collection. They are using a system called IPA for ads, and I don’t know whether there are formal guarantees for this system
So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
- Those of us that fight against ads, talking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)
If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
Doesn’t work with total cookie protection anyway.
Exactly. It sounds like Mozilla is trying to protect those that aren’t willing or able to protect themselves. It’s a noble reason to do just a little bit of evil. This is roughly the source of my mixed feelings on the subject.
You’re not wrong.
Whether you like it or not a lot of the internet relies on advertisement to work.
Some sites can introduce subscription fees and they can get out of it (I’d personally like that), some sites aren’t really sites but just optimising towards ad revenue (with all the shady practices that follow), but most produce valuable content for their users and rely on advertisement to sustain themselves.
So if we want to find a way to support that large center group, without enabling the crappy bottom tier, we have to make profiling safer. Well we don’t have to, we can dream of a safer, better world and try to bring it about by creating revolutions, but if we are practical, creating something that enables what the advertisement industry would like, without destroying what the users would like, is a far more realistic approach to making the world better.
You’re absolutely correct.
Some folks here just want to ban ads outright, but don’t stop to think what that would mean. The one that frightens me is what happens to the already crumbling news industry when they additionally lose all advertising revenue? And don’t say subscriptions, because those won’t come close to cutting it. Maybe a couple outlets like the Times could survive, but all the others are going under.
Exactly. There is a general need to destroy and rebuild a system but it is often dangerous and costly. Especially with regard to a system of laws and government. Improving the system more naturally is far more safe and more achievable at smaller scales.
I agree.
Imagine a world where Chrome doesn’t exist and instead Firefox + privacy preserving attribution is the default for all of the people who won’t listen to your reasons why they shouldn’t use chrome or say “I don’t need privacy, I have nothing to hide”.
It seems like Mozilla is trying to do the browser equivalent of shifting the overton window and I’m for that.
However I’ll be monitoring them very very closely.
Ya this is definitely one to maintain some skepticism about. People are criticizing the API’s security in other posts.
Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.
I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.
Wow. I 100% agree with you here.
There’s an element of trust when you buy a product. You trust that the product itself isn’t malicious and is intended to help you in some way. E.g. “This food is safely prepared and won’t poison me.” Harvesting user data and advertising really violate that trust.
Though it is worth noting that we don’t buy web browsers. We simply use them for “free“.
Sadly, tracking is the only way to perform attribution without help from the browser. Tracking is terrible for privacy, because it gives companies detailed information about what you do online. While Firefox includes many privacy protections that make it more difficult for sites to track you online (Enhanced Tracking Protection, Total Cookie Protection, Query Parameter Stripping, and many other measures), there’s a huge incentive for sites to find ways around these in order to perform attribution. Our hope is that if we develop a good attribution solution, it will offer a real alternative to more objectionable practices like tracking.
“Our hope is, that if we transfer the bank robber some of our money in advance, they’ll not come in and rob all of it.”
No! Jail the fucker!
While I appreciate your sentiment, this just isn’t realistic in the current state of the world. First, you need to make these kind of tactics illegal enough to incarcerate a person. Second, you need to expand and enforce this law globally. We definitely need this level of global cooperation, but are also soooo far away from achieving it
I mean they don’t have to literally jail advertisers (although I’d love that). I’d agree with hefty fines. Which, while not perfect, several EU laws have shown is possible unilaterally (e.g. Apple allowing third party app stores in the EU, albeit kicking and screaming).
I agree that it’s a mountain to climb, but we sure won’t reach the summit if we walk in the other direction.
The EU is a large enough governing body to have a significant global impact. And I truly appreciate the progress it makes on important subjects.
However, it’s still not effective enough. Apple doesn’t allow third party app stores in countries outside the EU.
The EU can’t “save” the rest of the world alone, true. All I’m saying is it doesn’t necessarily require the entire globe to cooperate to outlaw something just because it’s on the Internet. And that Mozilla scheme won’t save you either.
Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.
All your heroes are dead.
“The worst thing that can happen to your people is for them to fall into the hands of a hero”
- Dr Pardot Kines
New saying:
Kill all your heroes.
Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?
Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?
It’s a desktop only feature, it hasn’t been built into mobile I believe
IMO it’s the option in
Data collectioncalledMarketing data. It doesn’t say it’s PPA outright, but it sounds like the same sort of thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well shit. Firefox is still better because it doesn’t have the backdoor Google uses to catch and then block people using adblock on YouTube. For now.
It’s all on Ladybird now.
Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.
Because otherwise you’d be supporting the Chromium monopoly, and that’s the biggest sin imaginable in the Fediverse.
Safari user sitting quietly in the corner
Here’s the best part to that. Safari’s back end is called WebKit. At one point in time it was considered best in class. It was also the backend for Chrome as well for awhile.
Chrome still uses WebKit.
They forked it into Blink a long time ago now. They’ve diverged significantly since then.
I’m not in favor of talking about the Fediverse like it is a data monopoly like META or reddit. Lots of people make this place work in operations and content. Seems not that cool to slam them.
Sin? I just want there to be competitors.
Firefox is the competition… To market dominated Chromium.
…yes?
Because it is FOSS and responsible for many great contributions to apis that make the web what it is. It has history that goes way back. It has been decently transparent, certainly when compared to its closest competitors. It isn’t Google. It has a massive library of extensions. They aren’t planning to deprecate manifest v2.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like other browsers and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from the servo reboot. But Firefox is bread and butter and there is often drummed up nonsense about it.
Mozilla also maintains fantastic JS docs
Explaination from the article:
The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser’s server. The “advertising network” only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!
I had my doubts reading that Ladybird browser announcement, but more and more I’m thinking that Mozilla is desperately chasing the gravy train that has long departed with their sugar daddy (google) laughing all the way to the horizon.
Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.
From the article, quoting a Firefox dev explaining the decision:
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption.
In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision.
puts on They Live glasses
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca If we had made it opt in, then not a single human being on the planet would have enabled it, and we didn’t want that
Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.
So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?
