Well, Mozilla seems to be making some pretty questionable decisions, So I’m considering switching browsers for the third (Is it the third?) time. The thing is, I really like the way Firefox works, so I’ve been trying out the more famous Forks like Waterfox and Librewolf, although I’m going for Floorp. However, I’m wondering: is using a fork enough? I mean, they are Forks maintained by other people, but is there a chance that whatever Mozilla does to Firefox could affect those Forks? Should I jump to a totally different browser like Vivaldi?
Mozilla isn’t doing anything to Firefox. The Anonym purchase you linked to was literally to acquire a technology they developed which would, if implemented web-wide, end the dystopian nightmare of privacy invasion that is the current paradigm where a few dozen large companies track everything everyone does on the internet all the time. “Privacy preserving” isn’t just a buzzword in that article - privacy is actually preserved, and the companies involved (including Mozilla) learn nothing at all about you - not your name, not an “anonymous” identifier, not your behavior, nothing. Moreso, Anonym didn’t just create this technology, the entire company was purpose-founded to create this technology.
There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about Mozilla in particular at the moment. Very little of the animosity they receive is truly deserved once you dig past the narrative and find out what Mozilla’s actually up to, and why.
Continuous Mozilla hit pieces coming out….
I wonder which company motivated only by greed and the fact that their entire business model is “obliterating your privacy” is behind them
Either you make a deal with the devil or use the company that made the deal so you don’t have to
Ads should be tailored to the content of the website they are on. Not to me in any way whatsoever.
Then you might be interested in this new technology being tested by Mozilla that aims to replace tracking cookies.
I am donating regularly to Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s a myth that software can only exist through ads and tracking.
But the people employed to create content on all the websites and YouTube channels you use regularly care quite a great deal about advertisement or they’d have to do something else for a living.
What, you don’t use free services online?
I have YouTube premium, so that part of my money is distributed to those creators. I also have subscriptions for news sites, podcasts and comics through Patreon and other services.
And to be clear: I don’t have a single problem with advertising — I have a huge problem with tracking me wherever I go online. When I’m on a site for Japanese language learning, show me ads for flights to Japan but stop tracking every website I visit.
I am paying for the services I use.
So instead of multiple providers tracking people all the time there will be a single company doing it, but it’s okay because I should trust them for what reason? Why wouldn’t tracking companies just use their own tracking on top of this new technology?
I didn’t read too much into it, but roughly speaking: Because the technology by design aggregates data immediately and drops any personal identifiers/ the unaggregated data in the process. Other companies can build whatever they want on that, but if done properly, it is impossible to reconstruct user-specific data points and profile the users that way.
This type of privacy-preserving aggregation technique is not new, it is fairly common for things like demographic data, where you want to know things like population density and incomes for some area, without just publishing an exact address with corresponding income for every person (as an example).
Edit: I think I missed your point a little bit. I am unsure, but it seemed that Anonymous is responsible for designing the framework, not doing any tracking (i.e. it wouldn’t necessarily be “put all trust into them collecting it”). Maybe rolling out that technology could be done in a way of blocking other tracking, or maybe it is intended as a basis for regulations to take up. Maybe someone else can give more informed input on that.
