Mastodawn

Jeff Martin Jul 12, 2024

Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are turned on by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there.

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice?

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

UPDATE: The about:config setting for this is `dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled`. It's a bool. Set it to false to turn it off.

Privacy-Preserving Attribution | Firefox Help

Firefox 128 introduces privacy-preserving attribution, allowing advertisers to measure campaign performance while protecting user privacy.

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Matt McMahon Jul 13, 2024

@cuchaz it would be better if you were joking. Just reading through the proposal, the "tracking" information Firefox is allowing "adtech right in the front door" to recieve is limited to reports like the following:

Some large number of people (I'm not telling you who they were) saw ad X, and then went to website Y and did something of interest.

If widely adopted the DAP Proposal would be a huge win for privacy and return significantly more control to users.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap#name-security-considerations

Distributed Aggregation Protocol for Privacy Preserving Measurement

There are many situations in which it is desirable to take measurements of data which people consider sensitive. In these cases, the entity taking the measurement is usually not interested in people's individual responses but rather in aggregated data. Conventional methods require collecting individual responses and then aggregating them, thus representing a threat to user privacy and rendering many such measurements difficult and impractical. This document describes a multi-party distributed aggregation protocol (DAP) for privacy preserving measurement (PPM) which can be used to collect aggregate data without revealing any individual user's data.

IETF Datatracker

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Jeff Martin

@AffableMatt Sure, if the comparison is to the current surveillance hellscape, then this anonymized tracking is a little more privacy-preserving than that.

But that's not the valid comparison here.

The valid comparison is to big-red-button-style-just-block-all-the-tracking. That option already exists and gives excellent privacy. We just want advertisers to stop trying to break it or weasel around it by infiltrating the browsers themselves.

The huge win for privacy isn't for advertisers to collect slightly different kinds of data about us. The huge win for privacy is for advertisers to go back to content-based advertising and stop trying to mine our lives for data. Including attribution tracking of any kind, which is just another form of tracking.

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Matt McMahon Jul 13, 2024

@cuchaz You're just wrong. Please read the proposal.

1.) DAP is a hell of a lot better then "a little more privacy-preserving". The only user identifying data a service could possible get is an IP address (and that's only if your browser allows unproxied Aggregation Services).

2.) Your "big-red-button" is wish-casting. If you want to stop the arms race you need to incentivize disarmament. DAP does just that while keeping any "tracking" local and entirely under your control.

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Jeff Martin Jul 13, 2024

@AffableMatt I understand the proposal. But I feel like I'm the one not being understood here.

Nothing worse than sending exactly zero data about my life to advertisers will ever be acceptable to me. That means I don't even want to increment a counter in an anonymized cohort. This is what I already have with my adblocker, for as long as I get to keep using it. Anything less than that is a regression to me.