I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.
The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.
PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.
Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:
- Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
- If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
- Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
- Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.
This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.
deleted by creator
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.
Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:
- Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
- Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.
What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.
And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.
deleted by creator
This was not about “making things better for people on the Internet,” it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.
Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there’s no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.
Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy
I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!
deleted by creator
They didn’t sell your data before
Firefox has been funded by ads from the beginning, and has had sponsored tiles (aka ads) since around 2014 I think?
I personally think there’s a difference between selling ads and selling your data too. I’m going to go on a limb and say you see no distinction.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
it’s as simple as changing your useragent and
Good luck getting the average user to bother with that. But oh wait, the average user would not turn off javascript either, because dealing with that all day is very bothersome. How do I know? Been driving umatrix in whitelisting mode for years. I’ve got used to it, but every time someone sees that I need to reload sites multiple times to unbreak them they are visibly and audibly disgusted. What’s even worse is that they connect this with the fact that I use firefox, even after I tell them this is a fucking addon, and they think Firefox is like that by default.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Because Firefox is funded by ads, whether it’s the PPA ads outlined in this post, or search referrals from Google. Default adblocking would kill the revenue stream. Maybe Firefox could continue on with volunteers and donations, but not anywhere near its current staffing level. Eventually the engine would fall further and further behind and fewer and fewer people would use it.
To clarify… Making a browser is relatively easy and there’s lots of successful projects that do so without significant revenue. But making a rendering engine is really fucking hard and requires a ton of money to maintain.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Given that it collects no additional user data, and the API in question is a new standard that will require sites to opt in, I think making it an opt-out is sensible. I guess they could make a popup about it, but I really think this concern is baseless FUD from people who haven’t read the details.
I think making it an opt-out is sensible
Why? I’m not in the business of making ad companies’ jobs easier.
Let’s be real, there’s no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?
Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It’s not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they’re probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.
I personally am fine with making it opt-out, but I think it should be handled differently. This technology requires users trust, to have any chance of being successful. Enabling it without informing the user is not the way to gain it.
I would have put a little pop up explaining that they are trying to create a privacy preserving technology to measure ads with the goal of replacing privacy invasive technology. If the user doesn’t like it, it can be disabled in the settings afterwards.
I think making it an opt-out is sensible
The GDPR does not think so, does it?
No, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t trip GDPR because it’s not collecting any additional personal data.
I agree with this. I understand that the majority of users also don’t read release notes and some don’t even install add-ons, with this being enabled by default this would provide them with a more anonymous ad experience.
deleted by creator
including the option to not participate.
Which is useless if you’re not informed about it.
It looks it it would be fun to mock the report generation API, and returns tons of garbage data (possibly negative numbers).
At that point why not just mock google’s various data mining services’ APIs?
Here’s a take by a Mozilla employee :
- Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
- Browser development is not sustainable by just donations
- Transparency is most important
Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.
Firefox has never tried to run on donations though.
deleted by creator
You’re not supporting development, you’re supporting a rich guy getting richer:
Interesting to note that the Mozilla CEO earned nearly as much ($5.6 M) as Mozilla received in donations ($7 M).
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
deleted by creator
Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.
Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.
Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide “free.”
Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door
No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”
15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them
The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.
Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?
Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.
I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.
deleted by creator
I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.
deleted by creator
Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.
When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.
But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)
Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.
« Ad funded » ? Don’t they mean « Google funded » ?
Oh shit. Now that I have checked, it was turned on by default on mine too.
What’s wrong with you mozilla ?? Firefox was supposed to be the alternative
They have gone corrupt, they’re full-on techbros now
Here’s the page about it:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Read that instead of someones rant about it, which imo seems a bit obtuse.
This sounds fine, I’ve no problem emitting telemetry as long as it is 100% anonymous and can’t be traced to individuals
Same, although I have lingering paranoia that any data recorded by this might be traced back to me by making inferences when combined with other data; however, unlike the OOP, I will say I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
deleted by creator
No lol, I just didn’t notice and also didn’t expect it to be there. :|
I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s personally identifiable at all, just aggregate.
Here’s the information about it. It’s anonymous and It can be turned off https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
deleted by creator
That somehow makes it better?
Edit typo
Yes. The problem with cookies was that they could be used to track and identify you. If this can’t do that, then what’s the issue?
Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the others definitely try to keep it just anonymous enough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.
Edit: typos
Also, it might be annonymized for this dataset, by adding more ‘annonymized’ datasets stuff can be correlated
Noice
I guess librewolf is the future
deleted by creator
No telemetry though which is the big one
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I’m using Mull.
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
deleted by creator
I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
deleted by creator
It was on for me too, wtf…
Use Mull
Mine was off, just checked.
I know, that’s awful. I also turn it off. But that’s actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
Is it tracking you or tracking ads? If it was the latter and it is made public, that is information I’m sure we would all be interested in
Seems to be the latter.
This almost sounds like a hoax. But assuming it’s true… Install LibreWolf. It’s Firefox without the infuriating Mozilla stupid.
Is google corrupting Mozilla?
No. This is a privacy-protecting option that gathers no additional information about you or your hardware.
The other link posted in reply is overblown fear-mongering from Mozilla’s single biggest hater because they bought an ad company.
a privacy-protecting option that gathers no additional information about you or your hardware.
What information are they gathering then?
Then why aren’t they putting it up front and shouting from the rooftops about the new “privacy protecting feature”?
Literally every browser has this option, and it gives users a choice. If you use an ad blocker, it has this option as well and has had it for several years now.
Not this option, but generally I agree. Currently I don’t think this is bad, and in the longer term we will see if this leaks any identifyable data.
There are people that use Firefox who also get served ads?
deleted by creator
