cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598
Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
A bit disingenuous to call explaining what they’re doing as doubling down.
Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that’s also not what is happening. They’re trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.
I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don’t care about ads at least don’t get tracked.
They are not trying to “replace” cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.
Then there’s the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.
This comment alone:
“As part of this work, we are also committing to being transparent and open about our intent and plans prior to launching tests or features.”
… means they have no intention to be honest about shit.
It doesn’t track users. It collects anonymous statistics and assign them to a unique ID without storing any other information about the user.
And it IS meant to replace cookies, but you can’t just replace them all at once and disable the legacy cookies. It is going to have a gradual transition.
And they did tell us about this many months ago.
Gotta pay the bills somehow, and I’m just happy they care about privacy.
I dislike ads as much as the next person, and find uBlock Origin necessary for browsing the web, but the cold fact is that the internet is run with advertising, whether you like it or not.
If that is done without creating a profile on me, and without crippling the reading/viewing experience, I can tolerate advertisement.
I assume this is also an action towards becoming independent from Google funding; which is a good thing.
Happy to see some sane comments here. Couldn’t have said it better. You can hate ads and still keep a foot in reality.
69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks, only 5% of the population, not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
That’s really nuts to me when I run into it in the wild. It’s so easy and such a qol upgrade. I know a guy who self hosts a bunch of services, programming job, but does not use any ad block at all. He’s on the computer all day. Just looking at ads.
I can already see a crowd of advertisers running to them for the remaining 3% of its users.
I’m very happy that I moved to Floorp.
Here ya go! it’s a Japanese fork of FF that’s more focused on privacy. I prefer Librewolf personally but it’s good to have options I guess.
