Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
Here, specifically: lemmy.zip/post/19194792
Also: A Word About Private Attribution in Firefox, by the Firefox CTO.
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”.
They also just bought an Ad network, so can’t get ad revenue if they can’t track people.
Synergies™
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.
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.
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’
A lot of web browsers use chromium, which is the chrome engine. So anything that they want to add from the new manifest will eventually be added the engine. Firefox had a different engine, so they were not affected by the new manifest. However, they will sell our data from now on, so the Firefox engine is also not a choice anymore.
So that leaves not a lot of options.
Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.
And, we’re back to normal?
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.