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
For those interested in an alternative, and especially if you are a programmer, the Ladybird browser appears to be the most promising independent browser that could someday take Firefox’s crown.
A lot of us did but not everyone knows about LibreWolf or Mullvad etc
Also can’t help but think the average person will see the news about Mozilla’s new trackers and tell themselves ‘Well if I’m gonna be tracked anyway I might as well stick with Chrome’
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.
Super welcoming community here. Disagree with them they immediately want you out. Anyways, React is not a programming language, it’s a framework built on Javascript. My point was that hating on anything Meta built is stupid because they can build ok things
“Hating on anything the Nazis did is stupid because they can build ok cars”
Doing one ok thing doesn’t negate the fact that Meta is one of the most evil, unethical hellholes of a company. Anything they touch is absolutely rotten.
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.
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
I mean it might not be the most performant. But I’ve build with React and it made it easier to build projects quickly. Regardless, my point wasn’t about React and if it’s good or bad. My point was that Meta can build a framework that’s not about collecting data. Sometimes they have other motives.
Here I think the reason they are co-authoring this is to try to paralyze Google’s hold on personalized ads and user data. And probably reduce scrutiny of their data collecting actions in the sense that their new data collecting will be based on PPA if it goes mainstream.
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.
No ads but horrible performance. How is it that a iPhone 15 Pro is too slow to run this web site reliably? Why can it not remember that I’m logged in, or worse, why does it sometimes remember I’m logged in, after deciding I’m not? Why does it use so much storage on my phone? Why does it sometimes get stuck trying to draw the Home Screen?
I mean, it’s much better than Reddit was, and I try not to complain for the price, but it really seems like one of those things where it’s too ambitious and just doesn’t work as well for users. Maybe something simpler would be better
why does it sometimes remember I’m logged in, after deciding I’m not
I had that problem when Lemmy was under constant DDoS attacks, almost a year ago.
iPhone 15 Pro is too slow to run this web site reliably
You have both upvotes and downvotes so I will assume you are not the only one with these problems. In my experience Reddit website either glitches itself or glitches Safari every now and then.
Why does it sometimes get stuck trying to draw the Home Screen
Away from the all-in-one solution browser to using apps for each discrete feature. Like using a video player already on the OS to play videos or using a Gemini capsule to navigate to text-only “sites”.
The CTO of Mozilla and some other employee are posting on r/firefox defending this shit.
They say it is their job to help the adtech industry, by finding a compromise between my interests and Facebook & co’s interest. Only they get 90% of their revenue from adtech, so their actual job is to sell me out.
This “plan” involves collecting additional data on behalf of adtech right now, and then there’s a hypothetical second step, in which they will lobby to force this new system on everyone. Only (a) this second step is not going to happen, and (b) instead of being tracked by adtech companies, I’d now be tracked by “trusted third parties” or some shit which then sell my data, in aggregated form, to adtech companies. Wow. Great improvement this, we now have middlemen that are, uh, by semantic re-definition, not adtech companies.
So the actual second step is “???” and the third step is presumably “profit”.
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.
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.
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.
I mean people freaking out about this don’t actually understand what’s happening and why Mozilla is doing it. Mozilla is trying to build a new privacy-based advertising. The feature needs to be opt-in by default in order to have a chance to become mainstream. Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is. Most people don’t change default settings. So they can never get websites to try this better technology if their own users aren’t adopting it.
I also hate the attitude of this community they think Firefox is built for them(ultra tech savy, extremely privacy concious) when 99% of their users are not these things. If you want ultra privacy, go use Libreawolf or whatever. Those solutions are for that type of person. Firefox and Mozilla builds for the average person, which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the feature. (Anyone says otherwise is in a tech bubble and haven’t seen normal people interacting with their computers).
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
99% was referring to them not being both tech savy and extremely privacy conscious. I don’t disagree that the appeal of Firefox is better privacy. I just don’t think the average user is looking to absolutely remove every drop of data collected. I mean just look at the default Firefox homepage it comes with. It has sponsored shortcuts and sponsored stories. They put them there because the average user actually clicks on them. If everyone was privacy conscious like you say, they would turn off the feature and Firefox wouldn’t keep it because they don’t make money from it. But that’s obviously not the case.
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
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.
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.
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.
Here’s the best part to that. Safari’s back end is called WebKit. At one point in time it was considered best in class. It was also the backend for Chrome as well for awhile.
I’m not in favor of talking about the Fediverse like it is a data monopoly like META or reddit. Lots of people make this place work in operations and content. Seems not that cool to slam them.
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.
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.js if they have one.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
The EU can’t “save” the rest of the world alone, true. All I’m saying is it doesn’t necessarily require the entire globe to cooperate to outlaw something just because it’s on the Internet. And that Mozilla scheme won’t save you either.
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.
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.
I used to run that years ago and what I remembered was that it was a handful to maintain with updates when I used to run it on windows. It could be completely different now, so don’t let my past experience hold you back from trying it out.
tracking and telemetry by 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
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