… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
The way it works is supposed to anonymously allow the measuring of advertising performance. Which ads do well with which kinds of users. Instead of tracking each individual user this tracks context, meaning what site the ad was seen on etc. Thereby providing a way to know what kinds of ads work with what kinds of users without profiling every individual in the world.
That is what it’s supposed to do. Data still goes to an allegedly “trusted third party” (let’s encrypt, apparently) which then does this anonymization.
The idea is a lot less egregious, but it’s still only a good idea assuming you agree ads would be a good and ethical way to make the internet go round, if only they weren’t profiling everyone. I don’t.
Yeah the title of the post makes it sound much worse than what it seems to be in practice? Maybe I’m just naive
I think this a problem with applications with a privacy focused user basis. It becomes very black and white where any type of information being sent somewhere is bad. I respect that some people have that opinion and more power to them, but being pragmatic about this is important. I personally disabled this flag, and I recognize how this is edging into a risky area, but I also recognize that the Mozilla CTO is somewhat correct and if we have the option between a browser that blocks everything and one that is privacy-preserving (where users can still opt for the former), businesses are more likely to adopt the privacy-preserving standards and that benefits the vast majority of users.
Privacy is a scale. I’m all onboard with Firefox, I block tons of trackers and ads, I’m even somebody who uses NoScript and suffers the ramifications to due to ideology reasons, but I also enable telemetry in Firefox because I trust that usage metrics will benefit the product.
