this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 152 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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@lemm.ee 76 points 5 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] LouNeko@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

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

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[–] isaaclyman@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Do we think anyone would actually opt in?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You're probably right, and that's precisely the point. They're wasting time and resources on something no one wants.

[–] isaaclyman@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”

[–] solsangraal@lemmy.zip 128 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

it's hilarious that they basically accused their entire user base of being 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

[–] Reawake9179@lemmy.kde.social 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

LibreWolf on desktop and Fennec on Android, let's goo

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[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 98 points 5 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 57 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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@kbin.melroy.org 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Well, personally I would prefer not needing to pay for information. Advertisements make it so the reader doesn’t have to pay anything while legitimate writers still earn for their work. It empowers the whole world to learn.

The obvious (but riskier ) alternative here is donations. But it’s risky, and sometimes cripples continued operation.

Personally, to combat the SEO spam you mention, I use a non-Google search engine and an adblocker by default while disabling it on sites I like.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What about the billions of people (fewer ofc but the drown everything in their crap) trying to more or less make up news just for those jucy ad revenues? That's where we are today I feel.

Also, if you skip ads with an ad blocker, your whole argument falls apart??

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 5 months ago

If I find a website to the point, engaging, or respectable, I turn off my ad blocker for it. (If it has 6 ads on a single viewport I turn it back on again.) I also spent an hour tinkering with the Acceptable Ads list to make it work while removing illogical whitelisting like search results and parked domains. I browse these sites, and they get my ad revenue.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee 5 points 5 months ago

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

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[–] eee@lemm.ee 90 points 5 months ago (9 children)
  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@sh.itjust.works 31 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] zecg@lemmy.world 82 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Also I think in Gemini there's not much advertisers can do to "try to bypass these countermeasures".

They could add Gemini support in Firefox. Or even roll out their own "small web"-style protocol for hypertext. Simply without the functionality advertisers use.

With their resources it'd be a minor feature.

The issue is that while somewhere they have some people actually making a browser, as an entity it's a company making money on advertising. People deciding on directions use that as the main criterion.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 65 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

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@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] SouthFresh@lemmy.ml 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] _sideffect@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago

Ugh, you were supposed to be the chosen one!

[–] udon@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Much has been said about this already, but I'm really annoyed how they repeatedly try to twist this into a technical question like:

"This is better for privacy than how it used to be. Here are 20 reasons why, and we have good scientists who say it offers good privacy. Do you have any technical arguments against these privacy claims? We welcome a discussion about possible flaws in the reasoning of the scientists/engineers in terms of assuring privacy."

To me, that is a secondary question. More important:

  • Don't introduce tracking features against my will, with only an opt-out (ironically, while explaining in the same post why opt-outs suck)
  • Give room to a discussion about tracking-based advertisements, whether we want to have that in the internet (IMHO no) and support it in firefox of all browsers (IMHO no)
  • If they go this way, who is supposed to continue using their shit browser after this? The only reason left is that it's "the reliable other/good browser". People who don't care about these questions are using Chrome anyway.

This is such a self-destructive move, it's painful to watch.

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