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 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
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.
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
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.
“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
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”.
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
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
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.
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!
blog.privacyguides.org
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