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ELI5: What should I do about the newest privacy stuff in Firefox?

I can’t read long texts anymore, so I don’t really understand what’s going on. My internal bullshit-o-meter tells me that it’s being blown out of proportion.

Can someone summarise it?

And what should I do? Make some configuration adjustments? Switch to LibreWolf or another fork?

vert3xo ,

Personally I think people are overreacting. As far as I know you can turn everything off in the settings. People also complained about the privacy-preserving measurement being on by default but I’m pretty sure that was a bug because on a new install it gets disabled when you disable Firefox studies and other collection stuff.

kyub ,

Problem is, when you don’t oppose stuff like that, stuff like that gets added more and more and it’s all opt-out and some day you’ll have an update and something’s turned on by default and you don’t realize that for a year or so and then you’re like “shit, was this really on all the time”. Even worse when they hide settings well in the UI, or use dark patterns to annoy or trick you to enable a setting that’s actually bad for you.

Opt-out stuff is just bad, even in small doses. It’s always kind of a scam. I wish Mozilla wouldn’t need that kind of stuff. I mean they could be the knight-in-shining-privacy-armor browser, compared to Chrome/Edge/Opera/… But they are all similar unfortunately (by default). Yes, Firefox is still less worse than Chrome/Edge/Opera are by default. But “less worse” doesn’t equal “good”. Yes, you can configure Firefox to behave well, and by using a good preconfigured user.js these settings also will stick after updates. But you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. The common user doesn’t do that and shouldn’t have to. The Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser for example do not have anything bad enabled by default. And it’s likely they won’t ever have anything bad enabled after updates. So it is possible. The only reason the common browser makers aren’t doing it is because that gives them (or their business partners) less data/money.

vert3xo ,

Agree with you there. It’s definitely good to oppose this kind of stuff but I don’t think this is switching-to-another-browser bad. At least not yet…

BlameTheAntifa ,

PPA, or Privacy Preserving Attribution, is supposed to be a more-private alternative to cross-site tracking. Mozillas idea was: what if we could give advertisers metrics without compromising individuals privacy? Honestly, it doesn’t really impact you as a user or your privacy.

The problem is:

  1. Sites will continue to use cross-site tracking techniques anyway.
  2. This feature was enabled for everyone without their consent or giving them an option to choose.

You can disable it, though…

  1. Settings > Privacy & Security > Website Advertising Preferences.
  2. Uncheck “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement”
ImplyingImplications ,

I checked my settings and it was already off

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