- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598
Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
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69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks, only 5% of the population, not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
69%
Nice.
I installed local-network-wide DNS adblockers. After the change my mother found me and asked me why she couldn’t see the ads: she needed the ads and were enjoying them.
That is fucking epic. I had (not anymore) a similar issue with my wife and ads about shoes and coats. So I allowed all the crap on her devices only on Adguard Home.
Then her phone died, I gave her mine with GrapheneOS on it,until she could get a new one. The first 2 weeks were a pain: “where’s the playstore?”, “what is this gayscale chrome (Vanadium)?”, “My banking app keeps crashing”, etc. After a while we started spending more time doing things together, she was spending more time with the kids, and was being way more productive in her business.
Long story short, she kept the phone, I ended up getting a new one, and she even asked me to remove Windows from her computer and set her up with Fedora.
It’s a habit thing, I think.
A bit disingenuous to call explaining what they’re doing as doubling down.
Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that’s also not what is happening. They’re trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.
I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don’t care about ads at least don’t get tracked.
They are not trying to “replace” cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.
Then there’s the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.
This comment alone:
“As part of this work, we are also committing to being transparent and open about our intent and plans prior to launching tests or features.”
… means they have no intention to be honest about shit.
It doesn’t track users. It collects anonymous statistics and assign them to a unique ID without storing any other information about the user.
And it IS meant to replace cookies, but you can’t just replace them all at once and disable the legacy cookies. It is going to have a gradual transition.
And they did tell us about this many months ago.
I hate to say but technically collecting statistics is non-anonymous identifiable tracking, especially in this age where theres so many datasets companies can coorelate them to
Gotta pay the bills somehow, and I’m just happy they care about privacy.
I dislike ads as much as the next person, and find uBlock Origin necessary for browsing the web, but the cold fact is that the internet is run with advertising, whether you like it or not.
If that is done without creating a profile on me, and without crippling the reading/viewing experience, I can tolerate advertisement.
I assume this is also an action towards becoming independent from Google funding; which is a good thing.
Happy to see some sane comments here. Couldn’t have said it better. You can hate ads and still keep a foot in reality.
I choose to keep both feet firmly planted in unreality.
Fuck ads.
You’re lying to yourself if you think ads will ever be delivered without tracking.
This whole “anonymization” nonsense is a lie. It’s been shown, repeatedly, that data can be de-anonymised, especially data that’s not exactly narrowly collected.
First off, yes, the title of the post is misleading. Mozilla is creating a privacy focused ad system. However, I legit don’t get who this is for.
As a user, I’m not turning off my adblockers. Yes, privacy is important. I’m ok with some ads, but I’m not going to risk my privacy and security, because it’s not like I’ll have a clue who is backing said ads. So it’s not for me.
Normal users have shown that they really don’t care, let alone have any kind of clue what’s going on. So it’s not for them.
Advertisers have huge incentive to show you targeted ads. They don’t want to show someone an ad on the other side of the planet for something they don’t have access to. Also why would they want to show you an ad for something completely unrelated. What’s the incentive for them to give up their targeted ads?
It’s not like Mozilla is poising themselves for any kind of government oversight. I’m in the US, and the US gov doesn’t seem to give a shit. And the EU, while they have GDPR and they’re fining companies left and right, it doesn’t seem like they’re really targeting these kinds of ads. Outside of those two I don’t know anything about other countries honestly.
So again, I have zero clue who this is for or why Mozilla thinks this will be successful. There’s no incentive or knowledge that this is needed.
I use Firefox. I run Linux. I’m not trying to bash Mozilla here. I’m not trying to be a naysayer. I’m just trying to understand what kind of real world use case this solves and incentivizes users and advertises to use it over the alternatives.
I can already see a crowd of advertisers running to them for the remaining 3% of its users.
I’m very happy that I moved to Floorp.
No idea what’s that but it sounds… sticky.
Yet another Mozilla hit piece that seemingly-intentionally misrepresents the good they’re doing for users.It begs the question: who has the means and motivation to consistently pay “journalists” to malign the only browser that has the slightest chance of tearing any significant amount of users away from chromium-based browsers?
EDIT: Turns out the answer to my question above might, in fact, be OP! They wrote a patently false, inflammatory title that isn’t supported by the article (or reality) at all, and I fell for it like a sucker.
…did we read two different articles? The only link I see is to Mozilla’s own blog, explaining their choices in a relatively positive way. I’ve seen the effect you pointed out a lot, I just don’t see it here.
So banning ublock origin lite from the addon store was malice, after all?
That means they will drop MV2 as soon as Chrome ends the business/legacy support, since they were the alternative.
I think the ublock origin lite thing was a legitimate mistake, though I understand Mozilla’s depleting benefit of the doubt.
THe developer also don’t want to develop uBLock Origin Lite. Mozilla is sucking all energy out of people.
of course they don’t want, it’s such an inferior addon that it’s almost useless for privacy. it’s little besides just visually hiding ads. but that’s the best that can be done on chrome
uh… no… The add-on was also developed for Firefox, which still have Manifest V2. Because of the headache of Mozilla, Hill decided to stop development for Mozilla and only release the latest (signed) add-on via github, without further updates. The developer just makes a statement that it’s getting so worse to develop for Firefox that he just doesn’t do it anymore.
yes, it was made for Firefox too. did I say it wasn’t? but I think there was no real reason for anyone to use it on Firefox.
Well you said:
but that’s the best that can be done on chrome
And I think the best use of such a plugin is actually to use it on Firefox. Since Firefox (or Firefox forks) still support Manifest v2. So actually ad-blocks on Chrome are worse, because Google created Manifest v3, which sounds newer… but it ACTUALLY worse. Manifest v3 basically disallow developer to block ads effectively. Just in the name of kugh kugh ‘privacy’ or ‘security’… Don’t get fooled by Google here!!
SO please do not use Google Chrome, they are killing ad-blockers by the introduction of Manifest v3. More info: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-manifest-v3-ad-blockers/
I agree with you, I think there might have been a misunderstanding.
Well you said:
but that’s the best that can be done on chrome
that’s true. what I wanted to mean is that I don’t think gorhill really wants to develop that addon (uBO Lite), as I can imagine he’s fed up with the limitations and how little he can do there. I don’t know he’s reason for developing it, though. Maybe as an experiment on what it could still accomplish.
And I think the best use of such a plugin is actually to use it on Firefox. Since Firefox (or Firefox forks) still support Manifest v2.
I’m a little confused here. we don’t need that plugin on Firefox, because we have the full capability version.
SO please do not use Google Chrome
I totally agree. That would be a huge downgrade. Not looking back, only forward, for FF forks and whatever the future may bring us.
