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zecg ,
@zecg@lemmy.world avatar

in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win

Fuck off with that defeatist shit Mozilla, don’t decide for us.

gencha ,

Deciding for stupid people is a heroic act on their behalf. They protect us ❤️

_sideffect ,

Ugh, you were supposed to be the chosen one!

eee ,
  1. Rather than fighting against ad-tech , they’re caving. If someone comes into your house to punch you and rob you everyday, do you say “let’s find a solution that we’re both happy with, how about you rob me and don’t punch me?”
  2. We could have argued about how privacy-protecting this is, and whether it will actually prevent further intrusive tracking. Perhaps I might be persuaded to keep it. But the fact that I wasn’t informed about being opted in when upgrading, and the fact that the CTO is doubling down on “users are too stupid to understand this”, means they’ve lost any trust and/or willingness for me to listen to them. Turning this off for good.
Imgonnatrythis ,

If someone comes into your house to punch you and rob you everyday, do you say “let’s find a solution that we’re both happy with, how about you rob me and don’t punch me?”

I this economy? Of course not! I’d ask them to stop robbing me and keep punching me.

praise_idleness ,

That’s how you get Edge tbh

Aatube ,

I don’t get all the fervor against ads. People are talking about kicking them out as if it’s so much more ethical than piracy. What they do is surround your house with billboards; of course you negotiate in that scenario

Zedstrian ,

If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.

solsangraal ,

it’s hilarious that they basically accused their entire user base too dumb to understand, so that’s why they didn’t say anything about it, while simultaneously thinking this wouldn’t explode in their faces. which was S-tier fucking dumb.

anyway, as others have said: librewolf ftw

rottingleaf ,

because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers

No.

It’s, by the way, one thing every child should be taught to say, and traditionally an important part of one’s upbringing, and one strongly eroded in the last 20 years.

Simultaneously to that various people with strength are putting before us sets of false choices all leading to the same result, and we pick “the lesser evil” only to avoid saying “no”.

We don’t owe advertisers shit. They can go fuck themselves with a dry aspen stick. We don’t owe Facebook shit. They can go swim in sewers. We don’t owe Mozilla shit. They can go milk bulls.

Just no and nothing in exchange for something we don’t owe them.

SaltySalamander ,

We don't owe Mozilla shit

So don't use Firefox.

sunzu ,

That's right...use librewolf or mullvad browser or arkenfox...

If FF acts like this and the rest follow, well let's pitch and get another one going.

Either way, if people want Foss software, we will need to pay for it.

rottingleaf ,

That’s true, of course, but there’s a difference between paying and being exploited.

If they want this product to be profitable, then cheating by giving users something that steals their information is not the way.

Crowdfunding is good, donates are good, paid software is good even. Or paid services for free and FOSS software.

One of the reasons paying for software is not very popular is because it was historically kinda hard to just pay on a website. But now people do that all the time.

rottingleaf ,

Why? It’s a gift. One can clean it of unwanted features and use it.

Or if it’s not a gift, they should make it clear.

Cheating is bad. Being gifted a thing and then told some bullshit how you now need to give your blood to Devil to show your gratitude, you should just say “fuck off” and get on with your life.

systemglitch ,

Or just unclick that box?

BananaTrifleViolin ,

Yeah totally agree. The central premise of Mozilla’s argument is wrong: that we need to care about what advertisers want.

No compromise is needed as advertisers problems are not users problems. Mozilla has massively dropped the ball on this.

Aatube ,

What’s the alternative to give free sites revenue from the users who won’t donate, which is nearly all of them? Google Ads doesn’t seem to be adding an ad-free subscription anytime soon

Valmond ,

I feel the whole “I want to earn money by having an internet page/channel/video/…” is one of the problems here.

I prefer the old way, show some, sell some. Information wants to be free too, now it’s monetised in absurdum. Look for how grep works? Get a 7.000 word AI written html page that rambles about linux and the shells history. And that’s if you can get your hands on a something else than a 11 minutes long youtube fucking video…

ianovic69 ,
@ianovic69@feddit.uk avatar

I’m a bit worried about where Mozilla is heading with this, but not really for my own sake.

I got into this whole thing because of my hatred of being advertised at. The privacy aspect is less of a concern for me, although I do appreciate it.

I threw my lot in with BigG around Gingerbread and it’s too late now. I’ve turned off a much as I can in the last year or so, but G has everything I need and use.

This would concern me more if I was younger. My teenage children are very savvy with it all. We talked last weekend about setting up Proton mail and using temporary emails for everything. I can see a Linux future for them and that’s very reassuring. They are beginning to understand the nature of online privacy and how it relates to humanity.

But as long as I’m able to block ads, that’s good enough for me. I’ll move to Librewolf etc if I have to, but if Firefox keeps working I’m not going worry too much.

Those of you young enough and/or that it makes a difference to, I wholeheartedly encourage to be as privacy orientated as possible. The world is going to need you.

praise_idleness ,

librewolf ftw

SlayerTheChikken ,

Librewolf good, vanilla firefox bad

SouthFresh ,
@SouthFresh@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m impressed this person was able to type all of that with Meta’s giant dick in their mouth.

rottingleaf ,

You are overestimating Meta, it’s their money and not that kind of love, one can call it.

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Seems like a worthy experiment to me. I'll be leaving it turned on, for now.

ticho ,
@ticho@lemmy.world avatar

An experiment should be opt-in, not opt-out.

dojan ,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.

Oh, truly? Facebook happy with something that somehow respects people’s privacy and integrity? Perhaps instead it just shows that Mozilla is slipping. Because they have been, and at this rate it seems like they won’t stop. Sad to see.

There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose.

That’s not good enough. If this thing needs to be present, the option should be there to toggle on, not off. I don’t opt-in to privacy in my bathroom or bedroom, the privacy is mine by default. I don’t have to announce to the world that I don’t want it peeking in.

simple OP ,

If this thing needs to be present, the option should be there to toggle on, not off.

This is my takeaway in general. The idea of this sounds fine, but the fact that they opted everyone into this experiment is really stupid considering a huge chunk of people use Firefox are privacy-conscious and care deeply about this stuff.

Zarxrax ,

Isn’t privacy invasion (ie, cookies) already ON by default? What’s the difference?

simple OP ,

Not all cookies are harmful and some websites don’t work properly without cookies. Having cookies off by default also usually means user preferences wouldn’t be saved when you leave and return to a website.

nyan ,

Cookies have non-infringing uses, like identifying you to Lemmy’s Web interface so that you can post from your account with the settings you’ve chosen for it. Problem is, even sites where they have a proper purpose don’t set them at the appropriate time (as part of the login process, or when you first add something to your shopping cart for ecommerce sites).

Ad tracking has absolutely no uses that benefit the user, unless they’re the type of weirdo who actually clicks on ads voluntarily, which I’d guess is less than 1% of the population. Those people can use the opt-in toggle if they want.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Honestly?

Yes, it is shitty. But if you at all care about privacy you should be monitoring your software anyway. You never know when a previously “good” companies will do something you disagree with

DudeDudenson ,

Pretty much, if you’re security conscious you’ll go and turn it off, if it keeps meta from lobbying against the mozzila foundation it seems like a happy middle ground.

If/when they make it so you can’t turn it off anymore that will be a different story

LouNeko ,

Well you close and lock the door. So you kind of do opt-in. It’s just muscle memory at that point.

Treczoks ,

Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.

Dear CTO,

What makes you think that advertisers would drop any existing privacy intrusion software just because you just gave them another, less useful data set on top of what they already collect? For them, more data means better targetting which in turn means more profit. Do you expect those people to suddenly stop profiling everyone and make less profit out of the goodness of their heart? Well, then you are probably heading for a big surprise.

skeezix ,

This is the corporations-want-to-be-good falacy.

Treczoks ,

Yep. Common sense would tell one that this is a stupid idea from the word go, but sadly common sense is way less common than the name implies.

conciselyverbose , (edited )

It could make it easier to get privacy preserving legislation through if there’s a technical solution to the part they actually need.

I hate ads, and hate tracking, and do my best to prevent exposure to either. But internet ads need to know what sites are driving clicks to function. Unless you want to ban ads (which I’m all for, but isn’t realistic), technology like this, then banning additional tracking is your best bet.

Treczoks ,

I believe in “privacy preserving legislation” when I actually see it work. Legislation is Theory-Space, and quite often has no connection to online reality, as the net is international, but laws are not.

I, too, would like to ban ads, but banning them by law will not work unless it is an international law without any holes. Sadly, forcing advertisers into a less invasive mode and make them just rely on the firefox-defined technology is just as illusionary.

conciselyverbose ,

But the bottom line is that tech like this, that gives them the minimum they need without extra, is a hard prerequisite to any such laws even being genuinely considered. It’s easy to disable, and doesn’t give any extra information on default use case users because of all the other tracking. Advanced users who block that can block this easily. There’s no real downside.

There’s no legitimately plausible path to just banning their data collection without allowing for attribution of transactions. It won’t happen.

Banning them in the US or the EU would have a huge impact, because it would preclude businesses that operate in those countries legitimately from participating in the market for those countries. But it isn’t something that’s going to happen.

Zedstrian ,

Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.

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