… 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.
This is misinformation. The setting in question is not a “privacy breach setting,” it’s to use a new API which, for sites that use it, sends advertisers anonymized data about related ad clicks instead of the much more privacy-breaching tracking data that they normally collect. This is only a good thing for users, which is why the setting is automatically checked.
It’s illegal in Europe to have an opt-out checked by default, must be an opt-in unchecked by default. This is one of the reason that Microsoft has always troubles in Europe about privacy and opt-out services.
In the EU*
Sorry to be pedantic, but the UK, Swiss etc. are all in Europe but not in the legislative region where this law applies.
This even gets some people confused thinking those countries “aren’t in Europe”, which is why I wanted to correct this.
Which should tell you a lot; if Mozilla wasn’t confident about their anonymisation efforts their lawyers would not have allowed checked-by-default.
… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.
Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.
So, serious question: How is this good for me?
Edit: typo
It does not collect any more information about you. It provides far less information than pretty much every ad is already collecting, and that information is anonymized. It does not affect ad blocking solutions.
So, serious question: what are you not understanding here?
… as already mentioned above:
- This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
- Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
- It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
- This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.
advertising isn’t going to go away
That is certainly true for the moment, but IMHO that is not really an argument in this case:
- Advertisement can simply show me me some advertisement w/o spying on me. (Effectiveness of targeted advertisement is AFAIK highly controversial anyway.)
- My operating system does not have to spy on me and my browser certainly not.
- Mozillas BS arguments are just the ‘story told’, obviously they want to make money via advertisement and be the man-in-the-middle. I assume it is their legal right to do so and they can pursue the business model they like, but I do not have to like it.
- Again, advertisers will simply use this as an additional source of information about users for real time bidding, and not wind down other methods of information gathering, so this is only bad for me w/o any upsides.
- Mozilla is showing it is willing to sell it’s user data out this way (and silently do so), what are the next steps, what will happen with the next updates?
… and I happily have donated and will donate/pay money to/for websites and software I like/use and will happily accept business models dying which depend on selling my data out.
One of the main points of using Open Source operating systems and software is, that I have the freedom to use my own hardware the way I like w/o being up-sold or harassed by advertisement.
This does not prevent regular ad tracking, this provides additional data to advertisers. It also means Mozilla is now tracking me, and then Mozilla does this “anonymizing” on their servers. I do not trust Mozilla with this data, and I don’t trust that no way can be found de-anonymize or combine this data with other data ad networks already collect.
This is not in my interest at all. This data should not be collected. The ad networks can suck it, why should I help them?
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
Advertisers can already easily get this data without this setting, and any measures you take to block ads also by definition affect this setting.
Meanwhile, if this works and becomes widely available, regulators will be able to take measures against user surveillance without having to succumb to the ad industry’s argument that they won’t know whether their ads work.
And yes, this provides data to advertisers, but it’s data about their ads, not about users.
Ah yes, the hypothetical second step, in which tracking is going to be outlawed (I’m not holding my breath), except, of course, for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will “sell” (literal quote) the aggregate data, so I guess these are by semantic sophistry not adtech companies but something else.
I’m so glad this genius “plan” can be used to justify Mozilla funneling data to adtech firms right now, because in some hypothetical future timeline this somehow can be construed with a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection to be in my interest.
How about instead we have a browser that only cares about the users, and not give a fuck about adtech? Its number one goal should be to treat adtech as hostile, and fight to ruin that whole industry.
… No, it does not. The ads are currently already tracking clicks and conversions, on top of a whole boatload of other personal data. This API instead provides them with just the click and conversion data, divorced from the personal data and then aggregated with all the other site visitors.
Being against this proposal basically means you trust random websites and ad companies more with your data then you do Mozilla and LetsEncrypt.
This API instead
Instead of what? As I said, this is in addition to existing tracking, with some vague promise that if current tracking methods were banned or abandoned, this could be used instead. Except it’s not getting banned (Mozilla is not going to out-lobby Google) or abandoned (market forces prevent that), and why oh why would I want some alternative way for ad companies to get my data in that situation anyway? Let them die.
Now if another person is going to repeat this nonsense talking point, which you have picked up strait from Mozilla’s corporate PR, I’m going to lose my mind. Have some critical thinking skills. They are giving away your data right now and they give you nothing in return except a nonsense promise of a fairytale future.
Please I just want a browser that acts in the user’s interest only, does not work with Meta on adtech, and does not think it’s their duty to save the ad industry from itself.
What do you want? A Mozilla with no income? Because then there is no libre browser.
Can you imagine a world where Linux wasn’t directly getting paid by Amazon to hook all your machines up to AWS? You can’t! And how could vim possibly be developed without dropbox integration and sponsorship, that would never work. There is no way a world exists where Krita doesn’t sell all your drawings to OpenAI, how are they going to make any money?
None of these nice things could exist if they weren’t selling out their users, that’s just reality.
Are you trying to tell me that the host server is showing the ad, because last I checked, with my whitelist firewall, I never see ads because all ads are links to the ad server you are actually visiting. It is no different than opening up the webpage and connection to them. They get all the same fingerprinting info.
I’m not saying one way or another here, but there is no such thing as anonymous data collection. It only takes 2-3 unique identifiers to connect a person between a known and anonymous data set and there are almost always quite a few more unique identifiers than this in any given dataset. When I hear anyone say stalkerware is anonymous, I assume they are no longer just a privateer of a foreign drug cartel level state, instead they are full blown slave trader pirates fit for the gallows or worse.
Ask yourself this: Would you rather trust this data with Google or with Mozilla? Because if Mozilla needs income to maintain a libre alternative, they need to have a measured audience. Doing it in an anonymous way we can verify is better than letting Google and ad agencies do their level best to deanonymize you.
Ask yourself: Has Firefox even the expertise/man power to pull this off in a secure way or not? I’d rather have Google collect data, because they know how to protect their crown jewels and have a track record.
Mozilla demonstrated in the last decade that most of their projects are failures and they have neither the expertise nor manpower to pull something like this off.
The original mastodon post was with more details, and some drama, but the guy is trying to spam this link everywhere he can. so desperate for attention. lol
This is after they bought an ad company last month, Mozilla is compromised now
Edit: Somebody pointed out the reason: Mozilla Foundation has no members. It’s just the executives, no one in the actual community has any input in Mozilla’s direction, and considering how wildly out of touch tech executives are this explains it all
A bunch of Firefox devs need to leave Mozilla, fork it and start up an actual non-profit not based around monetization. I would happily donate monthly if I knew it were going to Firefox development, instead of the dozen other things Mozilla spends its money on. I’m sure I’m not alone.
EU should donate to firefox for a free world without enshitification. I mean give the money and force no ad tracking.
All of these claims clash with the reality of so many core open source projects, used by private users and massive corporations alike, that rely on single voluntary developers or super small groups which receive no flowers and no donations.
yea. but they get to claim like they fund the opensource world. like come on… stop posting fake funding claims on an anonymous forum and hire yourself a developer team if you’re so invested in this.
But whaa… developers salary aren’t funded by your $2 dollar donations, even with 100s of donations. oh geez… who woulda thought.
In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.
For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.
As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.
If Firefox would get forked by some developers I’ll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.
Proton did something similar.
This poll shows promise: https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/112654592627487236
Bye, bye Firefox!
Ok idealist.
What is your alternative funding stream for Mozilla?
It’s bad.
Is it worse than the advertising owned browser that gives your information directly to said advertiser?
They don’t. They rely entirely on donations (and sponsorship donations). It also mean, they have less resources to maintain and develop their software, ESPECIALLY Conqueror since it’s not as much well-maintained compared to other parts of the KDE software suite. Plus, Firefox do maintain their own web-engine, while KDE just use the WebKit one, so even more reasons that Firefox can’t substain with the resources KDE currently has.
I used to say the same, but now I wonder if they need as much as they have?
I am genuinely curious. There have been a lot of threads like this full of criticism for not spending enough on the browser.
It seems the browser is plenty funded, so maybe the org and co have too much and are in search of where to spend it?
Maybe it’s just the company with too much and the org is still struggling?
I mean, that argument starts to wade in to the Mozilla foundation as a whole, and what their purpose is, and that’s a giant kettle of fish.
Theoretical game. They lowball Google on how much Google pays them. How do people react? I don’t see them doing that and say, “Man, I’m glad Firefox is reducing Google’s influence over them”. I see them making a thread about how Firefox is giving Google a discounted rate because they’re all corrupt technofacists.
The core problem there still exists IMO. Funding.
What we really need is a reasonable way for open source, free, software, that exists for the good of the whole, to get money. But that has it’s own kettle of fish, where does it come from, how big is big enough to get some, what if they charge for support, how open is open enough.
Something something, seize the means of production, communism, etc.
