So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
- Those of us that fight against ads, tracking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)
If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!
Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.
I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.
Wow. I 100% agree with you here.
There’s an element of trust when you buy a product. You trust that the product itself isn’t malicious and is intended to help you in some way. E.g. “This food is safely prepared and won’t poison me.” Harvesting user data and advertising really violate that trust.
Though it is worth noting that we don’t buy web browsers. We simply use them for “free“.
Sadly, tracking is the only way to perform attribution without help from the browser. Tracking is terrible for privacy, because it gives companies detailed information about what you do online. While Firefox includes many privacy protections that make it more difficult for sites to track you online (Enhanced Tracking Protection, Total Cookie Protection, Query Parameter Stripping, and many other measures), there’s a huge incentive for sites to find ways around these in order to perform attribution. Our hope is that if we develop a good attribution solution, it will offer a real alternative to more objectionable practices like tracking.
“Our hope is, that if we transfer the bank robber some of our money in advance, they’ll not come in and rob all of it.”
No! Jail the fucker!
While I appreciate your sentiment, this just isn’t realistic in the current state of the world. First, you need to make these kind of tactics illegal enough to incarcerate a person. Second, you need to expand and enforce this law globally. We definitely need this level of global cooperation, but are also soooo far away from achieving it
I mean they don’t have to literally jail advertisers (although I’d love that). I’d agree with hefty fines. Which, while not perfect, several EU laws have shown is possible unilaterally (e.g. Apple allowing third party app stores in the EU, albeit kicking and screaming).
I agree that it’s a mountain to climb, but we sure won’t reach the summit if we walk in the other direction.
I agree.
Imagine a world where Chrome doesn’t exist and instead Firefox + privacy preserving attribution is the default for all of the people who won’t listen to your reasons why they shouldn’t use chrome or say “I don’t need privacy, I have nothing to hide”.
It seems like Mozilla is trying to do the browser equivalent of shifting the overton window and I’m for that.
However I’ll be monitoring them very very closely.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
Doesn’t work with total cookie protection anyway.
You’re not wrong.
Whether you like it or not a lot of the internet relies on advertisement to work.
Some sites can introduce subscription fees and they can get out of it (I’d personally like that), some sites aren’t really sites but just optimising towards ad revenue (with all the shady practices that follow), but most produce valuable content for their users and rely on advertisement to sustain themselves.
So if we want to find a way to support that large center group, without enabling the crappy bottom tier, we have to make profiling safer. Well we don’t have to, we can dream of a safer, better world and try to bring it about by creating revolutions, but if we are practical, creating something that enables what the advertisement industry would like, without destroying what the users would like, is a far more realistic approach to making the world better.
You’re absolutely correct.
Some folks here just want to ban ads outright, but don’t stop to think what that would mean. The one that frightens me is what happens to the already crumbling news industry when they additionally lose all advertising revenue? And don’t say subscriptions, because those won’t come close to cutting it. Maybe a couple outlets like the Times could survive, but all the others are going under.
WTH, Mozilla 🤦🏼♀️
Also, fuck you, dude:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
“You’re too dumb to understand so we make decisions for you”
Fuck that condescending prick with a pineapple.
Chill; he’s probably not talking about you. He is talking about “your mom”. If you want her to use Firefox, it’s got to be simple.
I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task.
IMO that just means they barely understand it themselves. Anyone that understands something with an amount of proficiency can explain it to a child layman and it’ll make sense, given they don’t use technical nomenclature.
*Layman is a better term. Children are… complicated.
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.
Let’s not forget when they shipped a full page ad for a Disney movie into a browser update
If you can’t explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don’t truly understand it.
Bah, that’s such a lame hot take.
Tonnes of things are really complicated to explain because they’re complicated.
It’s a paraphrased quote from Richard Feynman
Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry
No thanks, I’ll pass
I wish I could. Every time I hear about a React app, it’s some godforsaken ad choked nightmare of a “web 2.0” site that just makes the internet painful to use. I understand it may be possible to write a performant and usable GUI with it, but you never hear of such things
Web 2.0 was the mid-2000s idea that every website and service would be accessible via an http api and that it would allow easy integration. It was ads that killed Web 2.0, as users accessing a site via its api rather than its ad-filled website wouldn’t see any of those ads.
You’re literally using a website based on react technology right now. Lemmy is built on Inferno which is just an older version of React.
Programming languages isn’t adware made by a company that has horrible track records for respecting privacy. If you love Facebook so much, stay there and take your sealioning with you.
This is not sealioning lmao
You’re falling into the trap where anyone who disagrees with you has some sort of ulterior motive or grand scheme. I don’t need to remind you why that is not a good thing.
Browsers are an unsustainable mess of reckless feature creep. At some point we may all transition from using websites at all.
99% of their users are not these things
I don’t think so. People using Firefox are freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy. And if Firefox should lose those people, it will truly be the end
And these days, privacy is basically the only appeal of Firefox. It’s slower than chrome or webkit based browsers, hangs out with Safari in terms of standards support, and can’t hold a candle to either other browser when it comes to battery life. Why mozilla seems determined to throw that all away is beyond me
Privacy based advertizing:
-
Develop ad
-
Think about what websites your target demographic will probably frequent. (Be creative, dear marketing person! You can do it! This is the essence of what you’re getting paid for!)
-
Pay those sites to display your ad
Done.
Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is.
No. Why? It’s simple. They are collecting data I don’t want the ad networks to have instead of the ad networks and give it to the ad networks. That’s only more private than the status quo if I’m okay with them to have this data and trust them to handle it responsibly. Which I have no reason to.
which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the Feature.
See explanation above. That’s not too complicated to explain to a person that managed to turn on the computer. It only gets complicated when you try to follow the mental gymnastics you need to think this feature adds privacy for anybody.
Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.
“The worst thing that can happen to your people is for them to fall into the hands of a hero”
- Dr Pardot Kines
