… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
This is misinformation. The setting in question is not a “privacy breach setting,” it’s to use a new API which, for sites that use it, sends advertisers anonymized data about related ad clicks instead of the much more privacy-breaching tracking data that they normally collect. This is only a good thing for users, which is why the setting is automatically checked.
It’s illegal in Europe to have an opt-out checked by default, must be an opt-in unchecked by default. This is one of the reason that Microsoft has always troubles in Europe about privacy and opt-out services.
If it is truly anonymized then it isn’t protected under GDPR.
Which should tell you a lot; if Mozilla wasn’t confident about their anonymisation efforts their lawyers would not have allowed checked-by-default.
PII is being processed, even if it’s not being sold to advertisers. The underlying protocol works based on some session identifiers that uniquely identify a device to the aggregators. I don’t think that’s GDPR proof per se.
I don’t think any DPA will have a problem with this system assuming they implement their side of the system correctly, but I wouldn’t be too sure about Mozilla following the GDPR. They’ve defaulted to a lot of data collection without explicit consent over the years.
In the EU*
Sorry to be pedantic, but the UK, Swiss etc. are all in Europe but not in the legislative region where this law applies.
This even gets some people confused thinking those countries “aren’t in Europe”, which is why I wanted to correct this.
For what it’s worth, the UK still has the GDPR-derived law, though the decisions by the EU courts may no longer affect execution of it. Plenty of non-EU European countries, though.
That only applies to personally-identifiable information.
… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.
Second, this would be the first time in human history, they advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.
So, serious question: How is this good for me?
It’s the same principle as what Brave is based around: advertising isn’t going to go away, ever, but if we can set up a profitable advertising model that doesn’t require stalking people online, we can at least make advertising better.
I disagree with their current methods, but I also don’t know of a better alternative. Brave’s weird crypto stuff sure isn’t the answer, and neither is this, but if nobody figures out an alternative (that we can , advertising is only going to get more data hungry. The best alternative we have right now is Google’s FLoC and just about everyone hates that too.
Crowdfunding.
Do you donate to Mozilla?
Nope. Do you?
That is certainly true for the moment, but IMHO that is not really an argument in this case:
… and I happily have donated and will donate/pay money to/for websites and software I like/use and will happily accept business models dying which depend on selling my data out.
One of the main points of using Open Source operating systems and software is, that I have the freedom to use my own hardware the way I like w/o being up-sold or harassed by advertisement.
Advertisers aren’t going to take your word that you’ve been shown an ad. They need to know that you did actually load the ad, and that you’re not part of a bot network. Advertising fraud is crazy common.
Various websites I visit actually switched over to context based advertising (rather than personal tracking) but the one I visit most is moving back towards tracking, because advertisers just aren’t willing to keep the context based system alive. They’re not getting the feedback they need so they’re not spending money on ads, and the website is running a deficit.
The system Mozilla proposes has a chance of fixing that problem.
You may like to donate money, but the vast majority of users don’t. I wouldn’t want to pay a monthly 8 euro subscription to a tech news site, because that’s what they need to continue paying their staff. I’d rather have ads. The ads are annoying, the tracking is a huge problem.
I don’t particularly trust Mozilla enough to enable this system by default, but I can see where they’re coming from. The web is run by Google and Microsoft, and Google isn’t allowed to restrict ads by watchdogs because they may drive competing advertisers out of business. That’s why they’re moving to local processing (FLoC), but local processing comes with business risks that are offset by invasive bullshit. I’d rather have the Mozilla option. The protocol uses random noise to maintain privacy.
Just like with Chrome, you can patch out any parts you don’t like, of course. For now that’ll work. Once this system is shut down and FLoC + client attestation become the norm, it won’t.
As for a lot of the rest of your comment: you don’t seem to understand how the protocol works if you think Mozilla is selling data. I may have to give it to the tech lead, maybe he was right about informed consent not working on a system this complex.
Netflix pricing is quite reasonable already. The industry sucks, splitting subscription services into silos instead of taking on the music streaming model, but shows and movies are terribly expensive to make. People who get ads on Netflix are the ones without the income to pay the full amount, or who don’t care about ads I suppose.
I think the Meta/Google comparison doesn’t hold water. The protocol in use here intentionally hides information about you specifically, whereas Google and Facebook will let advertisers gather information about specific users (based on some filters, like age and market demographic) once the advertisement has been shown.
Good points, but again: I would assume advertisers track/fingerprint you anyway, so we are not speaking about getting anonymized information from Mozilla but IMHO we are speaking about getting one more data point about you, which is easy to de-anonymize in combination with the rest of the information known about you.
I get the sentiment, but no. No way. No way in hell I’m allowing advertisers to get a bit of data or a penny out of me in any way, shape, or form. Not the way they’ve been treating us for the last decade. They can eat dung for all I care. Total war.
It does not collect any more information about you. It provides far less information than pretty much every ad is already collecting, and that information is anonymized. It does not affect ad blocking solutions.
So, serious question: what are you not understanding here?
… as already mentioned above:
The data is still collected, it’s just being collected by Mozilla now. For this system to work, Mozilla will need to filter out bots and click farms at the very least. If they don’t, they may as well not collect this stuff at all. Without bot analysis, a cheap botnet can easily take out a competitors entire marketing budget by simply sending fake ad impressions.
I don’t see why I should trust Mozilla to collect all of this data to be honest. I trust them more than most advertisers, but they did acquire an advertising company, so who’s to say they’re not going to data mine this stuff and turn into the thing they promised to defeat? It happened to Adblock Plus and Ghostery, it can happen to Mozilla too.
The CEO’s explanation (“it’s too complicated to explain so we just silently enabled it”) sucks. Firefox has tons of data collection stuff where they just show a little top bar with a quick description and a button to go to the settings, they could’ve done the same here. The way they approached it feels like an attempt to smuggle it into non-techie Firefox installs in my opinion. Not being able to explain the benefits of this new form of data collection to the end user is no reason to make the feature opt out. Every update, Firefox opens a new tab to collect telemetry on browser update stats (and to inform me about “great new features”), if they can push a full screen explainer about “we added some coloured themes” they can also push an explainer about the ad tracking feature they just added.
Ask yourself this: Would you rather trust this data with Google or with Mozilla? Because if Mozilla needs income to maintain a libre alternative, they need to have a measured audience. Doing it in an anonymous way we can verify is better than letting Google and ad agencies do their level best to deanonymize you.
Ask yourself: Has Firefox even the expertise/man power to pull this off in a secure way or not? I’d rather have Google collect data, because they know how to protect their crown jewels and have a track record.
Mozilla demonstrated in the last decade that most of their projects are failures and they have neither the expertise nor manpower to pull something like this off.
Each to their own; may I suggest our friend and saviour Google Chrome? 🤣
Are you trying to tell me that the host server is showing the ad, because last I checked, with my whitelist firewall, I never see ads because all ads are links to the ad server you are actually visiting. It is no different than opening up the webpage and connection to them. They get all the same fingerprinting info.
I’m not saying one way or another here, but there is no such thing as anonymous data collection. It only takes 2-3 unique identifiers to connect a person between a known and anonymous data set and there are almost always quite a few more unique identifiers than this in any given dataset. When I hear anyone say stalkerware is anonymous, I assume they are no longer just a privateer of a foreign drug cartel level state, instead they are full blown slave trader pirates fit for the gallows or worse.
… No, I’m saying that a given site hosts the specific instance of an ad. That site has control over what the ad can harvest, and if they’re opting in to this PPA API, that information will be anonymized and much more limited than it currently is.
This does not prevent regular ad tracking, this provides additional data to advertisers. It also means Mozilla is now tracking me, and then Mozilla does this “anonymizing” on their servers. I do not trust Mozilla with this data, and I don’t trust that no way can be found de-anonymize or combine this data with other data ad networks already collect.
This is not in my interest at all. This data should not be collected. The ad networks can suck it, why should I help them?
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
… No, it does not. The ads are currently already tracking clicks and conversions, on top of a whole boatload of other personal data. This API instead provides them with just the click and conversion data, divorced from the personal data and then aggregated with all the other site visitors.
Being against this proposal basically means you trust random websites and ad companies more with your data then you do Mozilla and LetsEncrypt.
Instead of what? As I said, this is in addition to existing tracking, with some vague promise that if current tracking methods were banned or abandoned, this could be used instead. Except it’s not getting banned (Mozilla is not going to out-lobby Google) or abandoned (market forces prevent that), and why oh why would I want some alternative way for ad companies to get my data in that situation anyway? Let them die.
Now if another person is going to repeat this nonsense talking point, which you have picked up strait from Mozilla’s corporate PR, I’m going to lose my mind. Have some critical thinking skills. They are giving away your data right now and they give you nothing in return except a nonsense promise of a fairytale future.
Please I just want a browser that acts in the user’s interest only, does not work with Meta on adtech, and does not think it’s their duty to save the ad industry from itself.
Again, no, that’s not true. This API is only used by sites that opt into it, and in so doing, they are disabling the normal tracking which is far more invasive.
Where does it say that? How would this be enforced?
It’s enforced by the websites, they opt into this API. It says that everywhere you can read about this.
I can’t find this in the announcements and stuff. Where does it say that exactly?
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment
Check out the second and third paragraphs in particular.
This initial implementation is just to test the actual API, so I don’t believe sites using it will be blocking the other tracking yet, but once this API is tested and starts to see adoption, the goal is replacing tracking with this anonymized attribution.
Sorry but where does it say they will disable “normal tracking” if they use this API?
In the entire pitch, the announcement, this clarification, and all the technical data? Read literally any of it again and you’ll see that this is the whole point of the API.
You are missing the point. websites WILL NOT STOP TRACKING YOU! Nothing in this API can do that.
Advertisers can already easily get this data without this setting, and any measures you take to block ads also by definition affect this setting.
Meanwhile, if this works and becomes widely available, regulators will be able to take measures against user surveillance without having to succumb to the ad industry’s argument that they won’t know whether their ads work.
And yes, this provides data to advertisers, but it’s data about their ads, not about users.
Ah yes, the hypothetical second step, in which tracking is going to be outlawed (I’m not holding my breath), except, of course, for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will “sell” (literal quote) the aggregate data, so I guess these are by semantic sophistry not adtech companies but something else.
I’m so glad this genius “plan” can be used to justify Mozilla funneling data to adtech firms right now, because in some hypothetical future timeline this somehow can be construed with a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection to be in my interest.
How about instead we have a browser that only cares about the users, and not give a fuck about adtech? Its number one goal should be to treat adtech as hostile, and fight to ruin that whole industry.
You’re saying you’re literally quoting the ISRG as planning to sell the data? Because that goes directly against what I’ve read about this, which I believe says that they wouldn’t even be able to because they can’t see the data.
Ok, I misremembered it says “pay” for the aggregate results, not sell.
So it doesn’t say ISRG is going sell data, but the “full solution” will have other operators that get payed, i.e. they’re going to sell the aggregate data. Also, they envision multiple such operators, all of which it seems need to be “trusted”.
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment#end-user-benefit
Ah gotcha, thanks for bringing in the source - that does come down to the ISRG selling it. The thing I’d missed in your quote is that it’s referring to aggregate data. So yeah, how that meshes with what I’ve read is that the ISRG won’t be able to view user data, but indeed the ad performance data would be sold to advertisers.
What do you want? A Mozilla with no income? Because then there is no libre browser.
Can you imagine a world where Linux wasn’t directly getting paid by Amazon to hook all your machines up to AWS? You can’t! And how could vim possibly be developed without dropbox integration and sponsorship, that would never work. There is no way a world exists where Krita doesn’t sell all your drawings to OpenAI, how are they going to make any money?
None of these nice things could exist if they weren’t selling out their users, that’s just reality.
Yes I get your point. Some software can run without a large income stream, on a volunteer basis.
You’re using that fact to say that Firefox also can. And if you care to look at my profile you’ll see I’ve argued time and time again that Mozilla is an overblown organisation and should be slimmed down to a couple of hundred, working solely on the browser.
I doubt, however, that you can build a modern, up-to-date browser on a volunteer basis.
How many full-time people do you think it takes?
Linux has full time developers. Blender has full time developers. Lots of other projects have full time developers. They still don’t sell my data to Google.
A web browser is a very visible piece of software, relied upon by end users, businesses and governments alike. I’m sure enough people and organizations would donate their time and money to fund this, if it existed.