Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for
I’m not opposed to the idea of privacy-oriented advertising, but it needs to be:
local only - no service, including Mozilla, can correlate me to ads being shown; advertisers and Mozilla can only know broad stats
opt-in - ideally it would replace ads on websites, not add ads, and ad-block should continue to be effective; I’m willing to disable ad-block if a site opts-in to privacy-friendly ads (my concern is tracking, I don’t mind them getting paid)
auditable - I should be able to see why certain ads are being shown, and verify that none of that metadata leaves my computer
THEY USE GOOGLE ON YOUR DATA.
Again, big nope from me. I hope Mozilla significantly changes how they operate and only uses their talent to build something actually privacy-focused. That’s a pretty big ask, so I’m not optimistic.
My hopes are not high. Right before FakeSpot got bought out by Mozilla, they changed their privacy policy to add a “we will sell your data if we get bought out” clause.
(As a Mozilla product now, FakeSpot still retains private data and the right to sell it to advertising companies. So, at least to me, Mozilla has been an adtech company since 2023.)
They at least have good ad-block support, so I’ll continue using them as long as there’s nothing better. I’ve switched my mobile browser to Mull, and I’ll switch my desktop browser to Mullvad Browser if I need to (it’s not in my Linux distro’s repos, and I’m lazy).
Yeah, that and usernames are a big nope from me.
I’m not opposed to the idea of privacy-oriented advertising, but it needs to be:
Again, big nope from me. I hope Mozilla significantly changes how they operate and only uses their talent to build something actually privacy-focused. That’s a pretty big ask, so I’m not optimistic.
My hopes are not high. Right before FakeSpot got bought out by Mozilla, they changed their privacy policy to add a “we will sell your data if we get bought out” clause.
(As a Mozilla product now, FakeSpot still retains private data and the right to sell it to advertising companies. So, at least to me, Mozilla has been an adtech company since 2023.)
They at least have good ad-block support, so I’ll continue using them as long as there’s nothing better. I’ve switched my mobile browser to Mull, and I’ll switch my desktop browser to Mullvad Browser if I need to (it’s not in my Linux distro’s repos, and I’m lazy).
LibreWolf is pretty good too. It’s less like Tor than Mullvad Browser is, at least out of the box.