I go to great lengths to avoid advertising. I've even routed mail to my post office's general delivery rather than give away my address.
But I am also practical. The CEO makes a fair point that ads aren't going away. This wouldn't work as an opt-in.
The big miss here was messaging. The CEO has got to know most FF users use FF to for privacy. If they wanna make it an opt out, fine. But then people have to know there is something to out of. Then again, maybe this was in the release notes and on the blog.
It belonged in the big tab they popped up when 128 was installed. If that's not for informing users about major new features they really should know about, what is it for?
Now, it's not even an officially supported platform for firefox so perhaps the maintainer did something that breaks it, and it's not super critical because I follow the news anyway. I'm glad it works in at all in the first place.
Basically, I don't buy the proposition that the surveillance will ever stop, so I won't disarm myself
Also, I'm 100% sure that advertisers won't stop fingerprinting even when they have this, because it every little tidbit of info they can get will be worth it for them. It's not a gamechanger for either side. I won't let go of my adblocker and they won't let go of their sneaky invasive tactics.
Yes it was in the release notes and the blog. But it should have been an opt-in, or a forced choice either way.
It's a skill issue then, I do that too with resounding success, I haven't seen an ad in decades, either on pc or android. I don't use apps which have ads and only use browsers that support ublock origin on any platform.
> But I am also practical. The CEO makes a fair point that ads aren't going away.
So? I won't stop fighting. Especially since I seem to have won the moment ublock origin came out and that status is unchanged.
> This wouldn't work as an opt-in.
Yeah, because I hate that industry so much I'd rather not use a device than see an ad.
That's not practical, it's defeatist. Firefox has done absolutely nothing to make ads go away, that's all done by third-party extensions. They can at least try before claiming defeat.
> The big miss here was messaging.
No, that was a relatively minor blunder. The big miss is yet again ignoring preferences that they know a large part of their userbase has. Why do you think FF has been bleeding users? Because of shit like this that makes it into nothing more than worse Chrome.
> If they wanna make it an opt out, fine.
No, opt-outs for privacy violations are never "fine". Even an opt-in would still go agaisnt Firefox's mission since there is zero user benefit to this feature.
- "in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win"
It's in the user's interest to attempt to appease the spammers? It's in the user's interest to voluntarily hand over some personal, private information about themselves, to commercial stalkers, in hopes that–what–satiates the data harvesters?
Is this Mozilla's position?
Mozilla's position is, instead of the arms race to hide/identify traffic, if the browser builds in a way to measure conversions that doesn't rely giving up your identity then advertisers have less need of getting at your identity through other means. (And they haven't said this, but I assume the next step is, if advertisers can measure conversions then it becomes easier to envision legal countermeasures in the form of regulation)
Seriously, they don't deserve peoples' support.
And why would firefox users care about advertisers blocking firefox? Oh noes, ads aren’t showing up in my browser!
Who has been fighting the advertisers? Mozilla? No, they haven't even included a basic ad blocker with FF, only some lackluster "tracking protection" that barely anyone is going to enable (while implementing whatever new privacy leaks Google proposes). If the advertisers have won any fights it is only because Mozilla hasn't even bothered to show up.
* Safari is owned by Apple
* Edge is owned by Microsoft
* Chrome is owned by Google
* Firefox is partnered with Facebook/Meta
I guess technically there's Opera (owned by Chinese company Kunlun) and Brave (known for inserting affiliate links into stuff), which aren't any better.
In the future there might be Ladybird (where we'll have to see if Shopify wants something in return for their >=$100,000 investment), though that's pretty far off.
I know that maintaining a browser is a massive amount of work, but man, things are bleak. I guess that an OSS fork like Librewolf or Chromium is the best option these days.
Ungoogled Chromium*
From there we can devise that the best solution for society is a global ban on advertisement.
They didn't say that. They said this isn't it.
Mozilla becoming an advertising company unquestionably warps their incentives and brings them out of alignment with the end user. Tracking-based internet advertising is inherently adversarial and there's no silver bullet or technical approach that magically makes it less so. The fact that their chief partner for this is Meta is deeply disqualifying, given Meta's track record (e.g. Onavo scandal, among a multitude of other things).
There's a ton of real-world value in having Firefox, with a non-Chromium rendering engine, remain relevant in the market. But if Mozilla wants to retain any marketshare at all, they are going to have to compete with other independent browser vendors on UX and privacy. Becoming an advertising company is not the way.
localization/en-US/browser/preferences/preferences.ftl
1274,1282d1217
< website-advertising-header = Website Advertising Preferences
<
< website-advertising-private-attribution =
< .label = Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
< .accesskey = a
<
< website-advertising-private-attribution-description = This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you.
<
Some people want to keep letting the company do remote installation of code on their computers ("automatic updates") even when everyone knows the company is selling them out.
"The fox guards our hen house. In return we let him eat all the chickens he wants." Mozilla has got you covered.
Do Firefox users ever share patches to remove these undesirable "features". There are patched versions of Firefox with goofy names that claim privacy advantanges. But AFAICT always distributed in binary form.
There's details I don't understand yet and I'd like to see someone smarter than me critique the details, but for now I'll put my money where my mouth is by going in to Settings and re-enabling it.
0: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
Why should I have to jump through hoops and compromise my security and privacy to help some corporation with their marketing and advertising metrics? Why not just make this an opt-in option for users who want to volunteer their data to help these ad-tech companies? Oh that's right, no one in their right mind would do that.
And the CTO's whole argument about stopping the 'perpetual arms race' by compromising with and appeasing the aggressor is absurd. Malicious actors and ad-tech companies will just exploit this too. If there's a legitimate way to access this data then we can only assume there's an illegitimate way to do it also.
Ignore the CTO's hand-wavey justification and go look at what it actually does and tell me if you still hate it this much. I agree with you ideologically but I think you're engaging in friendly fire here.
What a load of b**
So THAT is why they turned a feature on by default that does not have any upside for the users? Why has blatant lying become acceptable for executives?
Can't wait for Ladybird to become a viable alternative.
> we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
(before the uproar):
> This feature will be enabled by default with an option to disable it. Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility.
So, yeah, bs excuse.
- main source of income for Mozilla is an Ads Company
- "ads industry is not going to pack up and leave"
- ads industry has much deeper pockets than Mozilla (even if Mozilla replaces Google's money bags with someone else's money bags of equal size)
- any step away from the extreme privacy-protecting position is seen as treason
?> main source of income for Mozilla is an Ads Company
Yes, that is a big part of why Mozilla cannot be redeemed.
> "ads industry is not going to pack up and leave"
They have already been banished from all my devices.
> ads industry has much deeper pockets than Mozilla (even if Mozilla replaces Google's money bags with someone else's money bags of equal size)
So? That won't allow them to control what runs on my devices.
> any step away from the extreme privacy-protecting position is seen as treason
Yes, it is betraying the trust people have put in a self-proclaimed privacy champion.
> Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.
This rings especially true to me. A lot of people, especially HN readers and myself included, hate advertising so much that we want to block ads altogether. But clearly we are still in the minority and we have to accept its existence. I think Mozilla's position here is clear: digital ads are evil but it's a necessary evil, so the best we can do is to limit how evil it could be.
If it were feasible to write one’s own web browser for personal use, no one would add this feature out of kindness to advertisers.
But even if it somehow was a good gamble, that it not how Free Software projects should work. Free software should prioritize the wishes of users. If a lot of firefox users collectively decided to give up some privacy to avoid loosing more privacy, that is their choice, but that is not what have been happening.
Using this kind of defeatist arguments, there is no end to backdoors and compromises that can be defended.
I would prefer Mozilla to fight in the arms race.
I also wonder: what is the next step? I.e., why would advertizing trust firefox instances. It is tempting to create a fork of Firefox that use and manipulate this API in all kind of ways.
Does that mean that there's only a few websites that can benefit from this data, and that there would be a list of websites that can profit from this or something like that in the future? Not sure if that's a good thing. I hate ads, and think that enabling this by default is still a super weird inversion of control (the user client should think about the user, not the websites that it browses). But I really wonder about who will gate keep the access to the aggregated data, and if that won't make the big players even more dominant in web advertising.
They could start by making their own surveillance opt-in.
The browser is one of the most important tools and we’re stuck with no truly good options. I’m positive my terminal or image editor is never going to smuggle data to help ad companies out, but with browsers and operating systems those concerns are the norm now.
Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312 - July 2024 (190 comments)
"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 - July 2024 (166 comments)
Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 - July 2024 (186 comments)