"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
blog.privacyguides.org
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128. Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release
  • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I thought I had left that crap behind years ago when I ditched Internet Explorer for Firefox, and then Firefox for Waterfox… but since switching to linux a few months ago I haven’t managed to install it so I’ve been stuck with Firefox… 😠 Time to try Librewolf I guess.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    The CTO of Mozilla and some other employee are posting on r/firefox defending this shit.

    They say it is their job to help the adtech industry, by finding a compromise between my interests and Facebook & co’s interest. Only they get 90% of their revenue from adtech, so their actual job is to sell me out.

    This “plan” involves collecting additional data on behalf of adtech right now, and then there’s a hypothetical second step, in which they will lobby to force this new system on everyone. Only (a) this second step is not going to happen, and (b) instead of being tracked by adtech companies, I’d now be tracked by “trusted third parties” or some shit which then sell my data, in aggregated form, to adtech companies. Wow. Great improvement this, we now have middlemen that are, uh, by semantic re-definition, not adtech companies.

    So the actual second step is “???” and the third step is presumably “profit”.

    • Anonymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 months ago

      I’m not as enraged by this as most, but I think the true test will be to see if this feature is disabled by default in future releases. If they actually do listen to their users, that’s better than any of the other big players.

      I read a bit about the new “feature” and it seems to me that they’re trying out a way to allow ad companies to know if their advertisement was effective in a way that also preserves the privacy of the user. I can respect that. I did shut it off, but am also less concerned because I have multiple advertisement removal tools, so this feature is irrelevant.

      The fact that it’s enabled by default isn’t comforting, but who would actually turn this on if it were buried in about:config? In order to prove its effectiveness to promote a privacy respecting but advertisement friendly mechanism, this is what they felt that they had to do.

      Of course, I could easily be all wrong about this and time will tell.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      They say it is their job to help the adtech industry, by finding a compromise between my interests and Facebook & co’s interest

      Well my interest is the complete collapse of Facebook & co, so it’s going to be hard to find a compromise there.

    • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      They also just bought an Ad network, so can’t get ad revenue if they can’t track people.

      Synergies™

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.

    And, we’re back to normal?

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
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          2 months ago

          You can’t turn it off completely and even if you did it would still send the data before you unchecked it. Better to use something else like Librewolf

              • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
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                2 months ago

                Why is telemetry useful or why is it needed to use pi-hole to block telemetry?

                Telemetry is useful to know what features your customers use. While it’s great in theory to have product managers who dogfood and can act on everyone’s behalf, the reality is telemetry ensures your favorite feature keeps being maintained. It helps ensure the bugs you see get triaged and root caused.

                Unfortunately telemetry has grown to mean too many things for different people. Telemetry can refer to feature usage, bug tracking, advertising, behavior tracking.

                Is there evidence that even when you disable telemetry in Firefox it still reports telemetry? That seems like a strong claim for Firefox.

                • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
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                  2 months ago

                  It is way easier to start with a clean slate and to avoid Mozilla randomly turning on antifeatures. Stock Firefox as so much wrong with it. I don’t need to care on Librewolf as all of those have been stripped out and it is a clean experience

      • HouseWolf@lemm.eeEnglish
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        2 months ago

        A lot of us did but not everyone knows about LibreWolf or Mullvad etc

        Also can’t help but think the average person will see the news about Mozilla’s new trackers and tell themselves ‘Well if I’m gonna be tracked anyway I might as well stick with Chrome’

        • sunzu@kbin.run
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          2 months ago

          Dawg thats exactly the okay here. Mozilla is infiltreated and being gutted from within.

          Let’s get real, corpos took over.

          I got same vibes from signal too bte but when I say shot about that clown. Whittiker or whatever, I am the bad guy lol

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
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    2 months ago

    For those interested in an alternative, and especially if you are a programmer, the Ladybird browser appears to be the most promising independent browser that could someday take Firefox’s crown.