"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again(blog.privacyguides.org) |
"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again(blog.privacyguides.org) |
Every time firefox pulls shit like this they piss off and alienate their users. What do they think is going to happen? If I were a Mozilla employee and my goal was to destroy firefox, this is exactly the sort of thing I'd be pushing for. I have no idea what firefox thinks it's doing, or if it's thinking about anything other than how to get more money from advertisers, but it shouldn't be hard see what exploiting users will lead to. Maybe they've already given up and their plan is to sell their users until they don't have any left.
Personally, I'll be exploring alternatives and forks and I'm looking to jump ship as soon as I can.
They're literally tracking the ads you see and the websites you go to and sending that data to at least one third party. That's the opposite of privacy. I could not care less if the third party collecting my data is Google, Mozilla, or the ISRG, none of them have any business collecting my personal browsing history just so that they can send reports back to advertisers.
> That said, as much as I hate advertising, I also understand that it is fundamental in providing funding for services (such as YouTube, or most news organizations) that enables the free flow of information online. For democracy to function, for humanity to keep getting better, information must be accessible to all, not just to those who have the means to pay for it.
The internet was here before ads came in. The lie here is that for "democracy" and "humanity" we must accept ads and being tracked. It just isn't true. You could make the same argument for putting ads/tracking in linux (operating systems must be accessible, not just for those with the means to pay for them!) but it would still be a terrible argument.
> You have to remember that the alternative is NOT the absence of tracking, but invasive personalized tracking done by ad networks
This is another lie. Firstly because currently my browser isn't sending reports of what websites I visit to third parties so that ad companies can collect more data and that's still an option, but also because this will do nothing to stop personalized advertising.
Regardless, I won't be participating in this effort. The advertising world has been so incredibly hostile for so long that I simply can't trust anything related to it.
I updated my FF yesterday and at this point I make sure to check the settings for suddenly "opted-in" "features" I am not aware of. This one also was a big surprise.
If I want to get screwed and sold to the advertisement industry by my browser vendor, I'd simply use Chrome. So please stop it, Firefox.
with this acquisition https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t... Mozilla is now an ads company
it's downhill only from here folks
but - as with any software updates, us users always suffer in having to re-check over all options to see what things changed on us (if we're lucky and get an option)
Also, to which tweaks were you referring?
To disable it on macOS: Safari > Preferences/Settings > Advanced > Uncheck "Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness"
To disable it on iOS: Settings > Safari > Advanced (scroll all the way down) > Turn off "Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement"
On the other hand: there is a ticket [1] asking for container-based-extensions, so something like Grammarly (aka the keylogger) could work only inside a container. It's been there for years, nothing changes. Seems like people are not interested in this kind of privacy stuff.
The good news: the CEO salary is really nice...
"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 - Jul 2024 (164 comments)
Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 - Jul 2024 (185 comments)
I'm wondering if they are really surprised to have almost lost all of their market share when they go against their core values so easily...
The tldr that says it all:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
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!This has much better utility than applying DP client-side but still has similar privacy guarantees
2. Firefox is vastly more configurable and extensible than Chrome/Chromium. For example, Tree Style Tab and Sidebery are far better for managing hundreds of open tabs than Tabs Outliner, the closest alternative for Chrome/Chromium. This difference, like the one above, is mostly relevant to power users.
Given that 20 years have passed since Firefox was first released, and 99.99% of web users nowadays are casuals who never have more than a couple tabs open and would sooner kill themselves than learn about the many useful ways Firefox can be configured via about:config, user.js, userChrome.css, userContent.css, etc., the answer to your question is probably no.
This ad stuff is very concerning, though :(
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330
In particular saying you’re sending your activity to Mozilla is not accurate: you’re sending the output of a postcomputation step that makes it cryptographically infeasible for Mozilla to see your activity.
Even if they pretend that data is "obfuscated" in some way...
Mozilla's Mitchell Baker took home $6.9 million for managing 750 employees and making $593 million in revenue, so $9,200 per employee and 1.16% of revenue.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's CEO earns $1.28M with 2000 employees and revenue of $328 million, which is $640 per employee and 0.4% of revenue. Although I can't say for sure whether that figure is full-time-equivalent employees or if they have a large number of part time staff.
So you might consider the Mozilla CEO's salary very low or very high, depending on what you mean by "comparable"
In terms of value for money - a generous salary might be justified if Mozilla is a thriving organisation that's going from strength to strength thanks to the wisdom of its leadership. But is it?
edit: oops, there *is* a LibreWolf Mac port now
Other than that, I dont remember any real differences. Waterfox has been fine for me because of the sync, but if you don't need account syncing, LW is fine.
However, I don't think that advertising is critical to providing free services. It's only important if you want to build a huge business doing it, or have something extremely fancy. In those cases, I don't see what's wrong (and I see plenty right) with doing in exchange for money.
Also, there were plenty of free services before advertising wormed its way into the web, and there still are ad-free free services now.
The ad world wants you to think that they're an essential online component, of course, but I am far from convinced that's actually true.
All that said, ignoring whether or not online advertising is a positive, the online ad industry itself is an extreme negative. We'd be much better off if it ceased to exist and was replaced by companies that don't treat people in such a contemptible way.
It is extremely valuable to know which users are interested in your product. Advertisers want this.
This product from Mozilla can be seen as a step in this direction, leveling the field at a “less tracking” level…
At the moment, non-tracking ads bring much less money in hence much more content must be paywalled, it’s mechanical. It’s not like everyone with a site is putting up advertisements for fun.
This is certainly the case for open source software, including internet browsers. In the case of Firefox in particular, people have long been asking for the ability to help support development directly through donations and Mozilla has refused.
> the online ad industry itself is an extreme negative. We'd be much better off if it ceased to exist and was replaced by companies that don't treat people in such a contemptible way.
I fully agree here too. Surveillance capitalism especially causes a lot of harms that persist long after an ad is shown or a product is purchased. The ad industry will never stop wanting more data, more control, and more money. It's up to us to say that enough is enough.
That's fine by me.
> It is extremely valuable to know which users are interested in your product. Advertisers want this.
Advertisers aren't entitled to everything they want. While they've been getting away with it, they're certainly not entitled to cause harm just because it will make them more wealthy than they would be otherwise.
> This product from Mozilla can be seen as a step in this direction,
I agree, this product from Mozilla is a step in the direction of giving Advertisers what they want: higher profits through the invasive tracking of users.
The fact that it allows advertisers to outsource the user tracking to yet another third party does not make it "less tracking". It may not even keep our data out of the hands of advertisers if they're able to use the information they're given along with additional data to re-identify individuals. Differential privacy may reduce the odds of that happening, but there are no guarantees.
> It’s not like everyone with a site is putting up advertisements for fun.
No, they mostly do it for profit. It's not like everyone with a site full of ads needs those ads to keep the site running, or that those ads couldn't be profitable without invasive tracking. It's not mechanical, it's usually just greed, selfishness, and laziness.
If someone wants ads on their website it's very easy to sign up with an ad network that is harmful to the people visiting your website. It's easy to not bother making sure those ads aren't pushing malware, or spreading harmful lies, or promoting scams. It's easy to just collect your money and not worry about who is being hurt by your choices. It's easy to say "everyone else is doing it!", but the fact that it's easy doesn't stop it from being wrong. Ads aren't going away, but we should insist on them being less harmful.
> This product from Mozilla can be seen as a step in this direction, leveling the field at a “less tracking” level…
Sure, that's a reasonable view. It's certainly Mozilla's. My view, though, is that it instantly transforms the browser away from being a "user agent". It means that instead of an ad company tracking me, my browser is, which means that the browser itself has become an agent for others rather than for me.
It's just moving the tracking out of the hands of ad companies directly and into the browser. You could argue that's better, but it's still tracking me. It puts the browser into a position where it is adversarial.
That, at heart, is why I will be sure this stays disabled. To do otherwise means that I can't really trust the browser and will make the web even smaller for me than it has already become.