We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.
Oh, truly? Facebook happy with something that somehow respects people’s privacy and integrity? Perhaps instead it just shows that Mozilla is slipping. Because they have been, and at this rate it seems like they won’t stop. Sad to see.
There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose.
That’s not good enough. If this thing needs to be present, the option should be there to toggle on, not off. I don’t opt-in to privacy in my bathroom or bedroom, the privacy is mine by default. I don’t have to announce to the world that I don’t want it peeking in.
If this thing needs to be present, the option should be there to toggle on, not off.
This is my takeaway in general. The idea of this sounds fine, but the fact that they opted everyone into this experiment is really stupid considering a huge chunk of people use Firefox are privacy-conscious and care deeply about this stuff.
Well you close and lock the door. So you kind of do opt-in. It’s just muscle memory at that point.
Isn’t privacy invasion (ie, cookies) already ON by default? What’s the difference?
Not all cookies are harmful and some websites don’t work properly without cookies. Having cookies off by default also usually means user preferences wouldn’t be saved when you leave and return to a website.
Honestly?
Yes, it is shitty. But if you at all care about privacy you should be monitoring your software anyway. You never know when a previously “good” companies will do something you disagree with
Yes, it is shitty. But if you at all care about privacy you should be monitoring your software anyway.
That’s only the case because privacy isn’t the default, and it should be. Privacy is something that’s been taken from us. I think people that don’t want to learn or care much about privacy are still entitled to it.
Pretty much, if you’re security conscious you’ll go and turn it off, if it keeps meta from lobbying against the mozzila foundation it seems like a happy middle ground.
If/when they make it so you can’t turn it off anymore that will be a different story
Do we think anyone would actually opt in?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that making it opt-in is probably seen in this case as equivalent to throwing the entire feature in the trash.
You’re probably right, and that’s precisely the point. They’re wasting time and resources on something no one wants.
I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”
it’s hilarious that they basically accused their entire user base of being too dumb to understand, so that’s why they didn’t say anything about it, while simultaneously thinking this wouldn’t explode in their faces. which was S-tier fucking dumb.
anyway, as others have said: librewolf ftw
LibreWolf on desktop and Fennec on Android, let’s goo
Why Fennec? I use Mull and both have warnings that they are not fully open-source. It seems to me that only Librewolf is good, too bad it’s not available for Android.
because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers
No.
It’s, by the way, one thing every child should be taught to say, and traditionally an important part of one’s upbringing, and one strongly eroded in the last 20 years.
Simultaneously to that various people with strength are putting before us sets of false choices all leading to the same result, and we pick “the lesser evil” only to avoid saying “no”.
We don’t owe advertisers shit. They can go fuck themselves with a dry aspen stick. We don’t owe Facebook shit. They can go swim in sewers. We don’t owe Mozilla shit. They can go milk bulls.
Just no and nothing in exchange for something we don’t owe them.
Yeah totally agree. The central premise of Mozilla’s argument is wrong: that we need to care about what advertisers want.
No compromise is needed as advertisers problems are not users problems. Mozilla has massively dropped the ball on this.
What’s the alternative to give free sites revenue from the users who won’t donate, which is nearly all of them? Google Ads doesn’t seem to be adding an ad-free subscription anytime soon
I feel the whole “I want to earn money by having an internet page/channel/video/…” is one of the problems here.
I prefer the old way, show some, sell some. Information wants to be free too, now it’s monetised in absurdum. Look for how grep works? Get a 7.000 word AI written html page that rambles about linux and the shells history. And that’s if you can get your hands on a something else than a 11 minutes long youtube fucking video…
Well, personally I would prefer not needing to pay for information. Advertisements make it so the reader doesn’t have to pay anything while legitimate writers still earn for their work. It empowers the whole world to learn.
The obvious (but riskier ) alternative here is donations. But it’s risky, and sometimes cripples continued operation.
Personally, to combat the SEO spam you mention, I use a non-Google search engine and an adblocker by default while disabling it on sites I like.
What about the billions of people (fewer ofc but the drown everything in their crap) trying to more or less make up news just for those jucy ad revenues? That’s where we are today I feel.
Also, if you skip ads with an ad blocker, your whole argument falls apart??
If I find a website to the point, engaging, or respectable, I turn off my ad blocker for it. (If it has 6 ads on a single viewport I turn it back on again.) I also spent an hour tinkering with the Acceptable Ads list to make it work while removing illogical whitelisting like search results and parked domains. I browse these sites, and they get my ad revenue.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
We don’t owe Mozilla shit
So don’t use Firefox.
That’s right…use librewolf or mullvad browser or arkenfox…
If FF acts like this and the rest follow, well let’s pitch and get another one going.
Either way, if people want Foss software, we will need to pay for it.
That’s true, of course, but there’s a difference between paying and being exploited.
If they want this product to be profitable, then cheating by giving users something that steals their information is not the way.
Crowdfunding is good, donates are good, paid software is good even. Or paid services for free and FOSS software.
One of the reasons paying for software is not very popular is because it was historically kinda hard to just pay on a website. But now people do that all the time.
Why? It’s a gift. One can clean it of unwanted features and use it.
Or if it’s not a gift, they should make it clear.
Cheating is bad. Being gifted a thing and then told some bullshit how you now need to give your blood to Devil to show your gratitude, you should just say “fuck off” and get on with your life.
Will do.
Or just unclick that box?
I’ve seen multiple times that checkboxes get checked again after updates, it’s easier to switch and forget about it. I don’t think it will be the last time Mozilla gets shady.
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Rather than fighting against ad-tech , they’re caving. If someone comes into your house to punch you and rob you everyday, do you say “let’s find a solution that we’re both happy with, how about you rob me and don’t punch me?”
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We could have argued about how privacy-protecting this is, and whether it will actually prevent further intrusive tracking. Perhaps I might be persuaded to keep it. But the fact that I wasn’t informed about being opted in when upgrading, and the fact that the CTO is doubling down on “users are too stupid to understand this”, means they’ve lost any trust and/or willingness for me to listen to them. Turning this off for good.
If someone comes into your house to punch you and rob you everyday, do you say “let’s find a solution that we’re both happy with, how about you rob me and don’t punch me?”
I this economy? Of course not! I’d ask them to stop robbing me and keep punching me.
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I think with Edge you get punched, robbed and then raped for good measure.
I don’t get all the fervor against ads. People are talking about kicking them out as if it’s so much more ethical than piracy. What they do is surround your house with billboards; of course you negotiate in that scenario
If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.
I agree that it would probably be much better if the setting was set by a pop-up instead (as they say, most users would treat it like a cookie banner anyway), though I still think it’s as morally reprehensible as piracy. If you think one of these aren’t fine, you probably should think the other isn’t either. Like you paid for the TV but the TV doesn’t pay for the cable package; blocking ads removes their revenue.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you also pay for cable. If I’m paying for a service I don’t want ads also served to me using it.
Cable tv also has ads, though
They had the same amount as modern subscriptions back when cable was as new as the Internet is today
If you’re paying for the cable package, yeah. But then you also have the free local channels. Most sites don’t require you to pay for them.
Gross
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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
Fuck off with that defeatist shit Mozilla, don’t decide for us.
Also I think in Gemini there’s not much advertisers can do to “try to bypass these countermeasures”.
They could add Gemini support in Firefox. Or even roll out their own “small web”-style protocol for hypertext. Simply without the functionality advertisers use.
With their resources it’d be a minor feature.
The issue is that while somewhere they have some people actually making a browser, as an entity it’s a company making money on advertising. People deciding on directions use that as the main criterion.
Deciding for stupid people is a heroic act on their behalf. They protect us ❤️
/s ?
Yes
Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.
Dear CTO,
What makes you think that advertisers would drop any existing privacy intrusion software just because you just gave them another, less useful data set on top of what they already collect? For them, more data means better targetting which in turn means more profit. Do you expect those people to suddenly stop profiling everyone and make less profit out of the goodness of their heart? Well, then you are probably heading for a big surprise.
This is the corporations-want-to-be-good falacy.
Yep. Common sense would tell one that this is a stupid idea from the word go, but sadly common sense is way less common than the name implies.
It could make it easier to get privacy preserving legislation through if there’s a technical solution to the part they actually need.
I hate ads, and hate tracking, and do my best to prevent exposure to either. But internet ads need to know what sites are driving clicks to function. Unless you want to ban ads (which I’m all for, but isn’t realistic), technology like this, then banning additional tracking is your best bet.
I believe in “privacy preserving legislation” when I actually see it work. Legislation is Theory-Space, and quite often has no connection to online reality, as the net is international, but laws are not.
I, too, would like to ban ads, but banning them by law will not work unless it is an international law without any holes. Sadly, forcing advertisers into a less invasive mode and make them just rely on the firefox-defined technology is just as illusionary.
But the bottom line is that tech like this, that gives them the minimum they need without extra, is a hard prerequisite to any such laws even being genuinely considered. It’s easy to disable, and doesn’t give any extra information on default use case users because of all the other tracking. Advanced users who block that can block this easily. There’s no real downside.
There’s no legitimately plausible path to just banning their data collection without allowing for attribution of transactions. It won’t happen.
Banning them in the US or the EU would have a huge impact, because it would preclude businesses that operate in those countries legitimately from participating in the market for those countries. But it isn’t something that’s going to happen.
Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.
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Librewolf good, vanilla firefox bad
Can I import all my Firefox saved logins and whatnot on librewolf?
Also: What browser can I use on iOS?
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I probably need to just take the plunge and start using an actual password manager. Just seems so daunting.
Thanks for the reply.
I recommend going for a password manager. Bitwarden (and probably every other modern password manager) let’s you import passwords from a file and Firefox let’s you export all your passwords as a file. All you have to do is take your FF passwords and chuck them into your password manager of choice
Yeah… the depths of my laziness knows no bounds. But this whole downward spiral of Firefox might be the push I need to get my shit together.
Any reason not to use bitwarden?
Nah, Bitwarden is what I use. It has a free tier and a paid tier for $10/year that adds some extra features. You can read about both on their website.
You can also autofill on mobile and desktop with the mobile app and browser extension respectively (the mobile app also let’s you autofill in any app that requires a login, which is nice)
Perfect. I’m sold.
Thanks
I’m impressed this person was able to type all of that with Meta’s giant dick in their mouth.
You are overestimating Meta, it’s their money and not that kind of love, one can call it.
Money has a way of changing people over time.
Ugh, you were supposed to be the chosen one!
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Much has been said about this already, but I’m really annoyed how they repeatedly try to twist this into a technical question like:
“This is better for privacy than how it used to be. Here are 20 reasons why, and we have good scientists who say it offers good privacy. Do you have any technical arguments against these privacy claims? We welcome a discussion about possible flaws in the reasoning of the scientists/engineers in terms of assuring privacy.”
To me, that is a secondary question. More important:
- Don’t introduce tracking features against my will, with only an opt-out (ironically, while explaining in the same post why opt-outs suck)
- Give room to a discussion about tracking-based advertisements, whether we want to have that in the internet (IMHO no) and support it in firefox of all browsers (IMHO no)
- If they go this way, who is supposed to continue using their shit browser after this? The only reason left is that it’s “the reliable other/good browser”. People who don’t care about these questions are using Chrome anyway.
This is such a self-destructive move, it’s painful to watch.
Wow, I have been a firefox user for years. I wasn’t even considering switching, even after the changes, until I saw this.
Hope the check was fucking worth it, you’re dead to me firefox.
What browser are you going to use?
I’ve switched to librewolf. Continues to encourage an open web by taking away chromium market share, without having to deal with mozilla’s bs
Seems like a worthy experiment to me. I’ll be leaving it turned on, for now.
An experiment should be opt-in, not opt-out.
So… You want the default to be more tracking instead and then people need to opt in to get their privacy? 🤔
