LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n
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.
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.
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.
I absolute despise ads but they are a necessary evil, it can be implemented well if it is not done intrusive and doesn't take up more space then the content it self. Also if it are mostly scam ads and such they might as well not have ads at all.
You're lying to yourself if you think ads will ever be delivered without tracking.
This whole "anonymization" nonsense is a lie. It's been shown, repeatedly, that data can be de-anonymised, especially data that's not exactly narrowly collected.
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.
I installed local-network-wide DNS adblockers. After the change my mother found me and asked me why she couldn’t see the ads: she needed the ads and were enjoying them.
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 occasionally accidentally open the fandom page for a game on Chrome with no ad block (which I keep around for Google apps) and it's unusable. Go there on Firefox with ublock origin and it's fine
And there's worse sites than that
Download sites for things like Minecraft mods have several competing "download" buttons without ad block
It's nuts people might accept these, let alone want them
First off, yes, the title of the post is misleading. Mozilla is creating a privacy focused ad system. However, I legit don't get who this is for.
As a user, I'm not turning off my adblockers. Yes, privacy is important. I'm ok with some ads, but I'm not going to risk my privacy and security, because it's not like I'll have a clue who is backing said ads. So it's not for me.
Normal users have shown that they really don't care, let alone have any kind of clue what's going on. So it's not for them.
Advertisers have huge incentive to show you targeted ads. They don't want to show someone an ad on the other side of the planet for something they don't have access to. Also why would they want to show you an ad for something completely unrelated. What's the incentive for them to give up their targeted ads?
It's not like Mozilla is poising themselves for any kind of government oversight. I'm in the US, and the US gov doesn't seem to give a shit. And the EU, while they have GDPR and they're fining companies left and right, it doesn't seem like they're really targeting these kinds of ads. Outside of those two I don't know anything about other countries honestly.
So again, I have zero clue who this is for or why Mozilla thinks this will be successful. There's no incentive or knowledge that this is needed.
I use Firefox. I run Linux. I'm not trying to bash Mozilla here. I'm not trying to be a naysayer. I'm just trying to understand what kind of real world use case this solves and incentivizes users and advertises to use it over the alternatives.
Also, WHY should I trust Mozilla with this? I use Firefox because it's the best alternative at the moment. However, Mozilla is degrading that trust by pushing their weather thing, pocket, turning on their ad network, etc.
Like a real reason I should trust Mozilla with this. Any company is 1 executive away from becoming Google levels of anti-privacy. So why would I EVER trust this?
Yet another Mozilla hit piece that seemingly-intentionally misrepresents the good they're doing for users.
It begs the question: who has the means and motivation to consistently pay "journalists" to malign the only browser that has the slightest chance of tearing any significant amount of users away from chromium-based browsers?
EDIT: Turns out the answer to my question above might, in fact, be OP! They wrote a patently false, inflammatory title that isn't supported by the article (or reality) at all, and I fell for it like a sucker.
…did we read two different articles? The only link I see is to Mozilla’s own blog, explaining their choices in a relatively positive way. I’ve seen the effect you pointed out a lot, I just don’t see it here.
Nope; you read an article, and I just reacted to comments on Lemmy, assuming that those commenting had read the article.
If I'd simply opened the link, I'd've seen it was on mozilla.org and would've realized it was just that the OP made a shitty clickbait title, not another Mozilla hit piece.
I just... I... I can't install a browser that's called "Floorp". I just cant. I wouldn't be able to look another person in the eyes and tell them that "I use floorp". It's probably a perfectly good fork of Firefox, but I just can't.