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… I don’t know of this is satire or not.
- There is now a feature labeled “Privacy-preserving ad measurement” near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
Definitely satire, the context from earlier:
- Firefox is worse than Chrome in their implementation of ad snitching, because Chrome enables it only after user consent.
I mean, have you met people? They could be completely serious when posting that lol.
I mean, have you met people?
I mean… I try not to
Same same. Also for like the same reason.
How is that obviously satire?
[edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in
Firefox is worse than Chrome
is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.
or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
The fact that both me and you are questioning whether this is satire or not worries me greatly.
The updates don’t sound like satire. Some of this is crazypantsrants
Absolute clown shoes
I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.
The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.
PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.
Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:
- Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
- If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
- Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
- Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.
This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.
My question is why Mozilla is trying to help advertisers at all instead of telling them to fuck off.
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.
Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:
- Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
- Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.
What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.
And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.
Firefox has a long history of marketing itself as privacy-focused. This was not about privacy. This was not about “making things better for people on the Internet,” it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.
The outcome of this scheme is less privacy for the consumer. It doesn’t matter that Firefox doesn’t include exact identifying information. It still identifies demographics and other specifiers that can be used to target groups and their habits otherwise it would be as useful as an impression counter. This whole scheme is contradictory to how Mozilla has been portraying itself and the opted-in default is a ‘fuck you’ to anyone who cares about this. Putting the word privacy in the name does not mean it’s private. PPA changes nothing with regards to the advertising industry.
Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy.
This was not about “making things better for people on the Internet,” it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.
Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there’s no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.
Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy
I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!
The last Mozilla executive had a salary of over 6 million before they replaced her with the new CEO making these changes. The owners of Anonym (previously Meta executives) made money when Mozilla bought them. There is still money to be made in non-profits.
I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!
They didn’t sell your data before, they didn’t die before. The idea that they suddenly have to start doing it now or else is incorrect.
They didn’t sell your data before
Firefox has been funded by ads from the beginning, and has had sponsored tiles (aka ads) since around 2014 I think?
I personally think there’s a difference between selling ads and selling your data too. I’m going to go on a limb and say you see no distinction.
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already.
Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
Absolute nonsense. How does rejecting ads or even including a default adblocker make Firefox any less relevant? I would hope most people would be more than happy to use a platform free from ads.
Have you used the Internet before? Or used it without a clue how services are usually paid for? You sound a bit clueless. The day they do that, a lot of websites stop working and nagging the user to turn off adblock, which I see all the time (as an advanced user who expects it). If I was a normie who didn’t understand this it might be quite confusing. This is obviously the reason basically no mainstream browser has done this or would do it.
Oh come on now everyone knows what an adblocker is. It’s right in the goddamn name: ad blocker, the thing that blocks ads.
Even if they don’t know how to disable it they can just google it. And if they lack the skill to do that too, they couldn’t have succeeded installing Firefox in the first place.
Stop trying to justify clearly unethical decisions because you used to like the entity who made the decision
Understanding something doesn’t mean you support it. Sad so many people can’t understand this or how normal people operate.
If you make your money through ads you’re a predator with nothing to contribute and don’t deserve to be in service. Eat shit.
Always love people who think you support bad things if you point them out.
I give zero fucks about “the way things are” or how they “have to work”, that’s propaganda to support inaction. I’ve lived my whole life blocking ads and giving the finger to advertisers, and telling me that ads make the world go round and that’s just the way it is regardless of personal opinion on the matter doesn’t jive well with me. Ads provide nothing useful to society, and fall in the same category as predatory CEOs and anticonsumer practices that generate a lot of revenue, but make the world over all a worse place to live. It’s not something to tolerate and put up with as a “necessary evil”, it’s something to target and eliminate.
If a revenue stream breaks just with one browser, deny access of this browser.
This obv. would render firefox impractical over time and therefore irrelevant.
Yes, there are free websites and apps. But you may have to ask yourself why or how these sites keep going.
So while yes - ads can be shown - the user decides if he wants to engage further with the site at hand.
There are ad blockers as plugins for firefox.
My point is: We shouldnt point at mozilla and blame them. They try to align interests I suppose. And I trust them with the anonymous data - I could even check it within its sources if I wanted.
More nonsense. If you’ve ever used a text browser, or a browser without javascript enabled, the vast majority of websites still work fine (Basically just mainstream social media garbage / fascist platforms that aren’t worth your time anyways breaks). If advertisers want to break their sites on non-compliant browsers, it’s as simple as changing your useragent and they have no way of knowing, assuming javascript is disabled. This is pointless hypothetical FUD with little existing precedence (Only thing I can think of is Apple blocking linux useragents that one time) so you can find a way to not hold Mozilla accountable for being a shit platform that’s supporting ad culture again.
it’s as simple as changing your useragent and
Good luck getting the average user to bother with that. But oh wait, the average user would not turn off javascript either, because dealing with that all day is very bothersome. How do I know? Been driving umatrix in whitelisting mode for years. I’ve got used to it, but every time someone sees that I need to reload sites multiple times to unbreak them they are visibly and audibly disgusted. What’s even worse is that they connect this with the fact that I use firefox, even after I tell them this is a fucking addon, and they think Firefox is like that by default.
More nonsense.
Is everything you put up to address my comment.
I did use a text browser. But you apparently fail their purpose. I pipe `` into it so that I can’t be fooled by such propaganda-spitting guys… (…).
… fascist platforms that aren’t …
You implied bad about me, so I reason this post with that.
… changing your useragent …
Sounds harder than triggering a flag for a feature which aims at serving you, the user.
Your next sentence, minus the next propaganda, makes me wonder:
This is pointless hypothetical FUD with little existing precedence (…) so you can find a way to not hold Mozilla accountable for being a shit platform that’s supporting ad culture again.
By “This” you mean the topic? I already prompted you my point of view; You didn’t address it. You falsely accuse Mozilla of pushing advertisements down ones throat. Obv. wrong. This undermines my point which I made in order to aid your shortcomings I saw.
You implied bad about me, so I reason this post with that.
Not at all. I was referring to Xshitter and Facebook. I wasn’t trying to imply you were a fascist. Sorry if it seemed that way.
Sounds harder than triggering a flag for a feature which aims at serving you, the user.
Clarify?
You falsely accuse Mozilla of pushing advertisements down ones throat.
My argument in this thread was that Mozilla is supporting ad culture, though I suppose serving targeted ads regardless of anonymity can still be considered “pushing advertisements down ones throat”. Regardless, pocket already exists to push ads down my throat, should I wish it to ;)
Because Firefox is funded by ads, whether it’s the PPA ads outlined in this post, or search referrals from Google. Default adblocking would kill the revenue stream. Maybe Firefox could continue on with volunteers and donations, but not anywhere near its current staffing level. Eventually the engine would fall further and further behind and fewer and fewer people would use it.
To clarify… Making a browser is relatively easy and there’s lots of successful projects that do so without significant revenue. But making a rendering engine is really fucking hard and requires a ton of money to maintain.
They are one of them. June 2024: Mozilla has acquired Anonym, […]. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla […] deliver effective advertising solutions.
Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they’re taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people’s privacy. I can live with that. They’re trying to build a win-win scenario.
I’ll still block ads. I’ll still reject cookies, but I feel like it’s a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I’m still in control of my browser! Great!
Agreed, just frustrating to find out about this here and not an obvious pop up alert somewhere
It appears in the release notes, though. Previously you would have been tracked. Now they try to anonymously return data to the tracker. So I do not see a reason to uncheck that flag.
Admittedly I am interpreting this feature from my gut. And you provide the sources I would have asked for. Appreciated.
The vast majority of people do not read release notes or even know they exist.
There is nothing positive about what has been done here.
It looks it it would be fun to mock the report generation API, and returns tons of garbage data (possibly negative numbers).
At that point why not just mock google’s various data mining services’ APIs?
including the option to not participate.
Which is useless if you’re not informed about it.
Given that it collects no additional user data, and the API in question is a new standard that will require sites to opt in, I think making it an opt-out is sensible. I guess they could make a popup about it, but I really think this concern is baseless FUD from people who haven’t read the details.
I think making it an opt-out is sensible
Why? I’m not in the business of making ad companies’ jobs easier.
Let’s be real, there’s no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?
Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It’s not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they’re probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.
I personally am fine with making it opt-out, but I think it should be handled differently. This technology requires users trust, to have any chance of being successful. Enabling it without informing the user is not the way to gain it.
I would have put a little pop up explaining that they are trying to create a privacy preserving technology to measure ads with the goal of replacing privacy invasive technology. If the user doesn’t like it, it can be disabled in the settings afterwards.
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I think making it an opt-out is sensible
The GDPR does not think so, does it?
No, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t trip GDPR because it’s not collecting any additional personal data.
I agree with this. I understand that the majority of users also don’t read release notes and some don’t even install add-ons, with this being enabled by default this would provide them with a more anonymous ad experience.
Here’s a take by a Mozilla employee :
- Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
- Browser development is not sustainable by just donations
- Transparency is most important
Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.
That’s certainly a quote that will stick with me.
Browser development might not be sustainable with user donations, but it sure as hell is sustainable when you get 400 million bucks by Google every year.
Firefox has never tried to run on donations though.
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You’re not supporting development, you’re supporting a rich guy getting richer:
Interesting to note that the Mozilla CEO earned nearly as much ($5.6 M) as Mozilla received in donations ($7 M).
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.
Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide “free.”
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Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.
Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.
Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door
No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”
15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them
The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.
Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?
Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.
I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.
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I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.
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Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.
When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.
But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)
Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.
Yeah. I want to donate directly towards the development of FF, but I can’t. I know several other people who of a similar disposition.
« Ad funded » ? Don’t they mean « Google funded » ?
Oh shit. Now that I have checked, it was turned on by default on mine too.
What’s wrong with you mozilla ?? Firefox was supposed to be the alternative
It has not been the alternative for a while now IMO. I have been using LibreWolf.
They have gone corrupt, they’re full-on techbros now
You can disable this “feature”:
-
Visit about:config
-
Set “dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled” to false
if you just uncheck the button. you don’t need to Visit about:config
Is this “feature” enabled mobile yet?
Sadly, Firefox mobile got rid of about:config, and I can’t find any relevant options in the regular settings.
Yeah I couldn’t find it either. Thanks for your help!
-
“It’s okay, we can enshitify a little.” - the board at Mozilla probably.
Just a taste. We can stop at any time.
just the tip. We’ll just soak the ad tracking for a bit.
It’s better to apologize than to ask permission, right babe? Right!?
“You dimwitted plebs are too stupid to meaningfully opt-in, so we made it opt-out.”
- Mozilla developer
Here’s the page about it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Read that instead of someones rant about it, which imo seems a bit obtuse.
This sounds fine, I’ve no problem emitting telemetry as long as it is 100% anonymous and can’t be traced to individuals
Well I do have a problem with that. Since we don’t see eye to eye, dont you agree then that it should have been opt in instead of a hidden opt out?
Let’s be honest, opt in telemetry features will collect so little data they might es well not exist.
Considering that ot is supposed to reduce user tracking by tracking ads directly, it’s a net gain for everyone.
I do agree with that :)
Same, although I have lingering paranoia that any data recorded by this might be traced back to me by making inferences when combined with other data; however, unlike the OOP, I will say I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Did you ironically preserve the utm_source parameter?
No lol, I just didn’t notice and also didn’t expect it to be there. :|
Here’s the information about it. It’s anonymous and It can be turned off https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
As someone who works on data anonymization, I never trust anonymization.
It needs to be opt-in to be acceptable. Opt-out is not acceptable.
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That somehow makes it better?
Edit typo
Yes. The problem with cookies was that they could be used to track and identify you. If this can’t do that, then what’s the issue?
Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the others definitely try to keep it just anonymous enough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.
Edit: typos
Also, it might be annonymized for this dataset, by adding more ‘annonymized’ datasets stuff can be correlated
The problem is supporting ad networks.
Edit: /s because apparently it wasn’t obvious. Anonymous is obviously better.
Mozilla has to generate enough revenue to continue developing their products somehow. It would be nice if donations were enough to cover those development costs but that simply isn’t the case. Because of this the ad networks are a necessary “evil”.
The setting from the original post is for sites in general, it’s not specifically about Mozilla sites. I’m not sure how having this option relates to their revenue, unless Google put it in their search contract with them?
Edit: Wait, I see people mentioning Mozilla acquired an ad company?
Yes. Yes, they did.
Jesus.
Supporting ad networks is not a ‘necessary’ evil. There are many not-for-profit organisations that do not use ads for revenue raising.
What would you suggest then? They’ve been unable to sustain themselves via donations alone.
Fire their ceo that they’re paying 6 million a year
When writing my previous post I had started writing a list of suggested strategies; but I changed my mind about posting that. I’m not a member of Mozilla. I don’t know what particular challenges they face, and my expertise are not in not-for-profit fundraising. So although I do have ideas, I don’t really want to get into a trap of trying to defend my half-arse ideas against people picking them apart. It’s beside the point. The point is just that it is achievable, as evidenced by other organisations achieving it.
I will say though that they could at least just mention on the Firefox ‘successful update’ page that Firefox is supported by donations, and give a link. A lot of people really like Firefox; and I think that if Firefox asked for donations, they would get more donations.
Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.
Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.
Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.
The issue is that I already knew about cookies. I don’t want my browser to phone home (or anywhere else) without my consent.
Cookies are a non-issue. They store data only locally and can be edited and removed at will. With third party isolation on by default there’s really no reason to worry about them much anymore. And if you do just install cookie auto-delete to clean things up.
This variant is definitely worse because the data is no longer just local.
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That’s part 2
librewolf ftw
I keep hearing Tor is the thing now.
and ungoogled-chromium for the chrome fans 👍
Noice
I guess librewolf is the future
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No telemetry though which is the big one
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I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s personally identifiable at all, just aggregate.
IMO, that’s splitting a hair.
For a browser that supposedly respects user privacy, the fact that this is opt-out rather than opt-in really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m going to reconsider my monthly recurring donation to Mozilla, especially if they keep this up.
Adjust isn’t google adservices. The difference is staggering, actually, and way more than a hair’s split on identifying information not being included.
I can’t help but see it as the foot in the door.
I understand that Mozilla needs money, but I can’t make everyone who uses Firefox commit to donating money to keep them from having to do things like this to stay afloat. But them going down this path makes me not want to donate at all.
I hate to break it to you but you aren’t a significant source of income for Mozilla. You are the product not the customer.
I never said I was, just that I wanted to support the browser that respects my privacy, and this move is making me reconsider it.
As long as it’s open source someone will be able to find a way to turn it off, either by an addon or by patching and compiling the source code.
Is it tracking you or tracking ads? If it was the latter and it is made public, that is information I’m sure we would all be interested in
Seems to be the latter.
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WTF… i thought this was just click bait but went to check on my phone as i am not at my PC right now
I’m on 128 on my phone. I just checked and both of those are disabled for me.
Same
double same
Triple same.
Idk what 128 is on a phone, but my galaxy s21 had everything still off. Guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it
build number (version) of Firefox, which is the software in question.
“Galaxy S21” is the model name for a physical Samsung phone, which isn’t relevant to the topic.
Oh, heard that. I’m on 128 on my phone too and they were all disabled
I’m on 128 on my phone and it was on for me, I definitely didn’t turn those on myself. wtf.
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
These are old options. I checked these off long ago.
I’m using Mull.
It was on for me too, wtf…
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
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I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
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Mine was off, just checked.
Use Mull
Here’s the info about it: https://mzl.la/3AcmG8q
I know, that’s awful. I also turn it off. But that’s actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
I see this as them giving companies a more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking. And just another privacy setting to opt out for us.
Instead of a reactive social media post, here’s how it works.
The only real alternative to this conflict of interest between companies and customers is an independent browser.
A more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking does not sound privacy-preserving to me.
it’s like a drizzle is a dryer alternative to a thunderstorm
surely I’d prefer none, but if I had to choose…
Go to the librewolf shop and walk out in a rain coat.
Moot point. Librewolf won’t exist without Firefox.
What are you talking about? No one called the existence of Firefox into question.
weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it
For everyone trying to find the setting— On my android phone, there’s a setting called “data collection”. Mine were already all off, so idk who it affects
