I don't find this persuasive at all. Mozilla wants to frame itself as the browser vendor that cares about privacy, but there are now popular independent browsers like Vivaldi and Orion that go much further than Firefox to protect user privacy, shipping tightly-integrated and fully-featured adblocking out of the box. Firefox on iOS still doesn't natively support adblocking, they weirdly segmented that capability out into a separate "Firefox Focus" product.<p>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).<p>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.
If anyone reading this was wondering, like me, "how can I automate diff'ing about:preferences to scan for new checkboxes that were inserted and opted-in without my knowledge?"—you can track the zip archive browser/omni.ja in the Firefox install root, and diff this specific file inside that archive (en-US for example),<p><pre><code> localization/en-US/browser/preferences/preferences.ftl
</code></pre>
Which is a plain-text localization file whose version diff will, in this example, contain:<p><pre><code> 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.
<
</code></pre>
It might be pragmatic to run this as an OS hook of some kind! Pop a short warning dialog every time Firefox adds a checkbox. Probably much shorter than the complete patch notes.
I clicked on this with a rebuttal already half-written in my head, but (after skimming the CTO's post and then reading the detailed explanation of PPA[0]) I'll admit that I jumped the gun on assuming that PPA was just the latest name for storing an ad id. The idea behind it (that you have to give the advertisers an anonymous way to measure conversions to have a shot at getting them to give up tying your traffic back to your identity) is reasonable, and the implementation doesn't look crazy.<p>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.<p>0: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment">https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...</a>
> That said, we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults<p>What a load of b**<p>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?<p>Can't wait for Ladybird to become a viable alternative.
It seems like a lot of folks are pretty upset about this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
No matter how you try to spin this, I don’t think you can call your browser a “user agent” if it’s implementing features that exclusively benefit advertising companies.<p>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.
It seems to me that Mozilla is gambling with the privacy of their users.
The gamble might be worth it, even though I do not think so.<p>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.<p>Using this kind of defeatist arguments, there is no end to backdoors and compromises that can be defended.<p>I would prefer Mozilla to fight in the arms race.<p>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.
>The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites<p>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.
Our Browser options are currently all tied to one of the big AdTech companies:<p>* Safari is owned by Apple<p>* Edge is owned by Microsoft<p>* Chrome is owned by Google<p>* Firefox is partnered with Facebook/Meta<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.<p>They could start by making their own surveillance opt-in.
But *what's in it for the user?*<p>- <i>"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"</i><p>It's in the user's interest to attempt to <i>appease</i> the spammers? It's in the user's interest to voluntarily hand over <i>some</i> personal, private information about themselves, to commercial stalkers, in hopes that–what–<i>satiates</i> the data harvesters?<p>Is this Mozilla's position?
Claiming modal consent dialogs are “user hostile” then making an obvious anti-feature silently opt-out is really insulting user intelligence.<p>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.
Recent and related:<p><i>Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312</a> - July 2024 (190 comments)<p><i>"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you"</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535</a> - July 2024 (166 comments)<p><i>Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330</a> - July 2024 (186 comments)
More dissembling. Anonymous and private are not the same thing. Claude Shannon mathematically formalized what privacy is all the way back in 1949, and this isn't it. No matter how much Mozilla twists and squirms, they are deploying a system that converts your private activities into information that benefits your adversaries. A privacy preserving system doesn't do that. It gives nothing to your adversaries.
It's an endless cycle of Mozilla buying some shitty company then forcing their shitty "technology" into Firefox. We must be on episode three or what of this nonsense now. "Leader"ship is rotten.
Why is everybody concerned about FF adding an alternative to tracking (a good intention in my opinion) and why is nobody concerned about the technical details, especially the so-called "3rd party" that is supposed to aggregate and anonymize the data? That anonymizer can be corrupted, bought, hacked, etc.
So from his post I got that together with Meta at W3C PATGC in partnership with ISRG they have created a DAP/Prio which uses an MPC, which is pretty uncompromising on a privacy front. I guess all my concerns are alleviated now, sounds very authoritative.
I'm sure I miss something, so could anyone from "privacy-protectionists" explain how they see Mozilla/Firefox surviving in the medium-to-long run, given that:<p><pre><code> - 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
?</code></pre>
I’ve started seeing adverts in theguardian.com again today, on iOS, where there weren’t any before. I use Firefox Focus and noticed that my is at version 128, released a week ago. Is this purely a coincidence or am I seeing this because of a change in policy at Mozilla?
Honestly I am pretty convinced by this post. Good job Mozilla.<p>> Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.<p>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.