"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128. Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to ...
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 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.
Ya this is definitely one to maintain some skepticism about. People are criticizing the API’s security in other posts.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
Doesn't work with total cookie protection anyway.
Exactly. It sounds like Mozilla is trying to protect those that aren’t willing or able to protect themselves. It’s a noble reason to do just a little bit of evil. This is roughly the source of my mixed feelings on the subject.
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.
Exactly. There is a general need to destroy and rebuild a system but it is often dangerous and costly. Especially with regard to a system of laws and government. Improving the system more naturally is far more safe and more achievable at smaller scales.
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.
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
childlayman and it'll make sense, given they don't use technical nomenclature.*Layman is a better term. Children are... complicated.
The difficulty is in spinning it to sound non invasive. And of course takes a level of self corruption to even want to do that, since PPA is invasive and you have to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
i read that as more like "nobody would opt in if it was opt-in".
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.
If you can't explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don't truly understand it.
To disable:
user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);Alternatively you can do the same through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Website Advertising Preferences and uncheck "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement"
Yup, but that's already mentioned in the article. Thought I'd give people the exact userpref, so they can modify their custom
user.jsif they have one.
Done. Thanks!
From the article, quoting a Firefox dev explaining the decision:
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption.
In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision.
puts on They Live glasses
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca If we had made it opt in, then not a single human being on the planet would have enabled it, and we didn’t want that
Explaination from the article:
The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser's server. The "advertising network" only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!
Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.
So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?
So is it safe to assume that alternate builds of Firefox (Pale Moon et al) will be probably removing that "feature" ?
Probably in your best interest to read their release notes
Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.
Default Firefox is becoming more and more unusable. I hope distros will start switching to something like Librewolf as the default browser in the future or heavily (and visibly) change the default Firefox config themselves.
Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?
Edit: I just did that
Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.
Because otherwise you'd be supporting the Chromium monopoly, and that's the biggest sin imaginable in the Fediverse.
Because it is FOSS and responsible for many great contributions to apis that make the web what it is. It has history that goes way back. It has been decently transparent, certainly when compared to its closest competitors. It isn’t Google. It has a massive library of extensions. They aren’t planning to deprecate manifest v2.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like other browsers and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from the servo reboot. But Firefox is bread and butter and there is often drummed up nonsense about it.
Mozilla also maintains fantastic JS docs
Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀
Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?
IMO it's the option in
Data collectioncalledMarketing data. It doesn't say it's PPA outright, but it sounds like the same sort of thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯It's a desktop only feature, it hasn't been built into mobile I believe
The Fennec fork on android may be worth looking into
Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?
Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.
Just use LibreWolf; I’m not up to speed on this stuff but I more or less believe the hype that it will protect my privacy simply by taking Firefox and adding an ad blocker for me and disabling all the shit for me
A custom user.js might be a good base to work off of. For example https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox
But jumping ship might be your best bet. Forks like Librewolf are good or otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser can work well too.
otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser
With manifest v3 and this thing active on chromium browsers, privacy respecting chromium may not exist.
It's all on Ladybird now.
I had my doubts reading that Ladybird browser announcement, but more and more I'm thinking that Mozilla is desperately chasing the gravy train that has long departed with their sugar daddy (google) laughing all the way to the horizon.
Well shit. Firefox is still better because it doesn't have the backdoor Google uses to catch and then block people using adblock on YouTube. For now.
Does Firefox explain what measures they’ve taken to protect their aggregation servers? If so, this is a perfectly fine and practical method for privacy preservation
Looks like they are using a Prio based protocol. If they are using Prio2+, I think this article is likely overblown. EDIT: I mixed up my sources - Mozilla tested Prio for telemetry collection. They are using a system called IPA for ads, and I don’t know whether there are formal guarantees for this system
I've tried explaining to the Firefox cult that they do a lot of tracking and telemetry by default but they just hurl insults. Time to leave the cult.
tracking and telemetryby Firefox is not even comparable to that of chrome. Google knows you better than you. Firefox's telemetry used to be solely for improving user experience, and not ads and bullshit.Now that Firefox's gonna show us some ads, I think I have to get away from it as a protest
I get a lot of beef for Brave. Any viable alternatives that aren’t derivatives of Chromium or FF but are maintained?
Webkit based browsers like safari and gnome web are your only options if you don't want derivatives.