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So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214
You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new featu...
There is now a feature labeled "Privacy-preserving ad measurement" near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.
The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.
PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.
Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:
Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.
This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.
Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn't going anywhere, so there's two options:
Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.
What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it's shown to work and other companies start adopting it.
And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won't restrict you in that regard.
They are one of them. June 2024: Mozilla has acquired Anonym, [...]. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla [...] deliver effective advertising solutions.
Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they're taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people's privacy. I can live with that. They're trying to build a win-win scenario.
I'll still block ads. I'll still reject cookies, but I feel like it's a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I'm still in control of my browser! Great!
It appears in the release notes, though.
Previously you would have been tracked.
Now they try to anonymously return data to the tracker. So I do not see a reason to uncheck that flag.
Admittedly I am interpreting this feature from my gut. And you provide the sources I would have asked for.
Appreciated.
Given that it collects no additional user data, and the API in question is a new standard that will require sites to opt in, I think making it an opt-out is sensible. I guess they could make a popup about it, but I really think this concern is baseless FUD from people who haven't read the details.
I personally am fine with making it opt-out, but I think it should be handled differently. This technology requires users trust, to have any chance of being successful. Enabling it without informing the user is not the way to gain it.
I would have put a little pop up explaining that they are trying to create a privacy preserving technology to measure ads with the goal of replacing privacy invasive technology. If the user doesn’t like it, it can be disabled in the settings afterwards.
I agree with this. I understand that the majority of users also don't read release notes and some don't even install add-ons, with this being enabled by default this would provide them with a more anonymous ad experience.
It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it's been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, "The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?"
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.
Browser development might not be sustainable with user donations, but it sure as hell is sustainable when you get 400 million bucks by Google every year.
Same, although I have lingering paranoia that any data recorded by this might be traced back to me by making inferences when combined with other data; however, unlike the OOP, I will say I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Adjust isn't google adservices. The difference is staggering, actually, and way more than a hair's split on identifying information not being included.
For everyone trying to find the setting— On my android phone, there's a setting called "data collection". Mine were already all off, so idk who it affects
I know, that's awful. I also turn it off. But that's actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
well at least there are good forks for the browser out there. how long until they start going chrome route?
Feels like google realized that once normies realize how shiti they are, they will run for firefox which by then hopefully will be a properly gutted front end for an ad company.
Literally every browser has this option, and it gives users a choice. If you use an ad blocker, it has this option as well and has had it for several years now.
Safari refers to it as "Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement", and Chrome includes an option as part of its "Privacy Sandbox." Please have the decency to do a basic google search before being an asshole :)
So.... finally Mozilla has slowly but surely going into the dark side huh...
I'm not surprised anymore, they even had telemetry code inside android apps from waaay back then (although seems for debugging purpose)
In the end I'm not justify all company bc they need money for survive & exist, although i don't like the way they do it
Mozilla has been bad actors since at least 2017, they implemented a piece of malware called Cliqz on a small number of German user's installs that recommends various services based on browser history (aka tracking and advertising); so I'd hardly call this a new development, or Mozilla "just now" falling to the dark side (and that's not even mentioning pocket and DoH to cloudflare, which are still enabled by default).
I've read up on how it works and it says it's tracking how well or badly ads perform when shown to me. That's tracking ads, otherwise called ad tracking.
It's tracking how well ads perform without tracking individual users. Tracking ads isn't the problem. Tracking users is the problem. Before this the only way to track ad performance was by tracking users. This is a way to track ad performance without tracking users.
Vivaldi is not private, or open source. It is also a fork of Chromium. If we are going to name forks, then Librewolf or GNU Icecat are better browsers by a mile.
Name anything Vivaldi specifically (not Chromium-wide) has done to screw over their users. I can't name a single thing, while I can name many Anti-User things Firefox has done.
Unfortunately, open-source becomes nearly meaningless when the cost to produce a fork becomes so prohibitive and the open-source project starts acting like a for-profit company.
Cognitive dissonance? Not supporting bigotry is wholly unrelated to this issue. Also who calls gay people homosexuals? Just say gays like a normal person ffs
if by "community" you mean the majority of users... I think you are backwards in both of those. Most don't care about what Andreas did, and most firefox users are outraged at this.