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So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214
You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup.
If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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:
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.
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Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there’s no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.
I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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?