Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you (mastodon.social)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 138 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (40 children)

I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.

The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.

PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.

Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.

If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.

Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.

PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago (24 children)

My question is why Mozilla is trying to help advertisers at all instead of telling them to fuck off.

[–] [email protected] 109 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (22 children)

Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.

Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn't going anywhere, so there's two options:

Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.

What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it's shown to work and other companies start adopting it.

And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won't restrict you in that regard.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Firefox has a long history of marketing itself as privacy-focused. This was not about privacy. This was not about "making things better for people on the Internet," it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.

The outcome of this scheme is less privacy for the consumer. It doesn't matter that Firefox doesn't include exact identifying information. It still identifies demographics and other specifiers that can be used to target groups and their habits otherwise it would be as useful as an impression counter. This whole scheme is contradictory to how Mozilla has been portraying itself and the opted-in default is a 'fuck you' to anyone who cares about this. Putting the word privacy in the name does not mean it's private. PPA changes nothing with regards to the advertising industry.

Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This was not about "making things better for people on the Internet," it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.

Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there's no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.

Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy

I'd love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The last Mozilla executive had a salary of over 6 million before they replaced her with the new CEO making these changes. The owners of Anonym (previously Meta executives) made money when Mozilla bought them. There is still money to be made in non-profits.

I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!

They didn't sell your data before, they didn't die before. The idea that they suddenly have to start doing it now or else is incorrect.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

They didn't sell your data before

Firefox has been funded by ads from the beginning, and has had sponsored tiles (aka ads) since around 2014 I think?

I personally think there's a difference between selling ads and selling your data too. I'm going to go on a limb and say you see no distinction.

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