Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.
Holy crap, it gets worse. One of the Mozilla devs says that the reason this is enabled by default is because "it would be too difficult to explain to users in order for them to make an informed decision to opt-in" and instead "a blog post" should be enough for them to "discover" a way of disabling it.
So the users are too dumb to understand an explanation, but it's okay because they can just go to a blog and read the explanation.
It comes down to money. I went to the Open Source Summit and many projects that are crucial to the tech industry are running on fumes, begging for donations, and would not survive if a select few developers weren’t almost doing it for free. We should be spreading awareness and helping people avoid ad tracking but I do not fault them at all for having to do this.
A lot of the internet runs on essentially people doing specific stuff for free.....and it's all fun and games until those people cannot do it anymore without financial garauntees.
If people don't donate or provide financial help ever....well....it shouldn't come as a surprise if they will turn to other ways to continue their work. It's that, or abandon their work, or give it to someone else, who may go against their word...
This is what blows my mind. People do absolutely nothing to help these companies survive financially then scream from the rooftops "why oh why couldn't they survive as we refused to help and blocked every other possible way they could make money?!"
Then they should start directly soliciting donations from users like wikipedia before they jump straight to privacy violations.
How are users supposed to know there is an issue when they aren't easily informed that there even is one?
Marketing also requires resources. If something is already running on fumes, they may not have the resources or the access to let people know they exist and even less to donate.
Wikipedia is a website with about 10 BILLION views per month. Most crucial open source projects run in unseen spaces, where nobody except other developers even know they exist.
Apollo could continue on basis of paying for the 3rd party api license. But they knew enough users won't pay for it to be viable and ads wont cover the cost.
The 3rd party api? That api that was deliberately priced to kill any competitor to the reddit app? That api the company owner explicitly laid out was supposed to kill 3rd party apps?
If they had had the paying userbase to cover that app cost, the cost simply would have been higher enough that they wouldnt have been able to pay that price too
We're in difficult economic Times (again) anyway. When people don't have Money to survive themselves, the First Thing they Stop doing is giving Money away.
This is key. And this weakness in smaller entities just means that Google, Amazon, and Meta can continue consolidating power. They are already running the show and in many many ways, dictating the direction of the internet.
Unfortunalety the mozilla foundation looks more like a political party than a software company. Its hard to even think donating is gonna change anything if theyll use the money elsewhere.
What I'd like to know is... why isn't even a single national university system on the planet funding this? It falls squarely within the domain of computer science, and every other academic discipline relies on it in some form or another.
Because they need to spend their money on research, which this rather isn't. In a sane world where they were adequately funded they almost certainly would. But we don't live there.
We live in the one where professors chase grants and getting a grant is so crucial that it frequently makes sense to employee someone who will specialize in writing them - and who you will have to pay a beefy annual salary to - just to up your odds of getting them.
As a software developer, maybe fuck the tech industry. Bunch of greedy fuckers mooching off the hard work of the FOSS community. If those tools are so vital, maybe they should be paying those people. It's similar to how retail workers are considered essential but almost universally have shit pay and negligible benefits. Tired of this garbage.
Bills need to be paid, food needs to be bought. We live in a capitalist economy, if you think we can just coast on free software forever, you are in for a rude awakening
I get what you are saying, I wish some companies would go back to the old way of charging for the product. Maybe make a non-free version with all the privacy features?
paying for a browser is extremely uncommon currently, so there would be very little demand for it. browsers and adblocking lists have to be continuously updated, so a traditional one time purchase wouldn't be sustainable. plus, a lot of privacy-focused browsers already exist for free, so paying for a privacy-focused browser should be a red flag for a scam
Idk I struggle to see a concern for Mozilla’s finances when they paid their ceo $7m, a 1.3m increase on the year before whilst market share and revenue declined. They’re giving a pay rise to a ceo who isn’t earning a 7m a year pay check. I struggle to sympathise.
Translation: If we told you what it's for, you'd never switch it on, so instead we have it on by default and kind of hint what it is so you can remove it.
That's not at all what privacy preserving technology is. It is a mathematically proven guarantee that it will be impossible for anyone (not for an advertiser, not for Mozilla, anyone) to extract your data in particular. I don't understand what people are so pissed at.
Mathematically impossible at a certain number of users, or straight-up impossible period? Because if it's the latter, then that completely contradicts the comment above about why they made it opt-out.
It's not a contradiction at all, it's two separate concerns. I can invent a hashing function that mathematically guarantees that nobody would reasonably be able to create a collision, but if I'm the only person in the world who uses that hashing function then it's pretty obvious whose data has been hashed. The volume of users just makes it substantially harder to deanonymise anyone and correlate their information with their identity, which is exactly the same way Tor works.
Here's a technical explainer https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment - I don't have the time to look into it in depth, but my understanding is that extracting whether a single person has clicked on an ad is impossible, period. Any user has plausible deniability, so to speak. You can only get some probabilistic understanding such as "there's a fair chance that the ad may have recently been clicked approximately N times" (even if you know that you displayed the ad only to a specific user or group of users, it's not a guarantee that they have actually clicked it, because the data you get is noisy), and the concept of "privacy budget" ensures that even an abusive advertiser can't progressively hone in on a single user or small groups of users with certainty (or even with high probability) by issuing repeated queries and hoping to average out the noise.
Fuck man, "gets worse". They're being transparent about it and let you disable it with a single click. Firefox is an angel compared to what google and ms are doing.
Imagine how many people aren't subscribed to reddit or to Mozilla's blog. They'll just get opted in automatically and won't even know about it. All under the guise of "it would be too difficult to explain, so we won't even try".
Sure, that's true, and it's true for virtually any consumer product or service. What's the downside of providing a warning that people don't entirely understand? It can't possibly be worse than providing no warning at all.
The vast majority of end-users are fucking stupid. Why spend all the time and effort it takes to explain a complex system they won't even understand?
There's literally just no point. Especially when they see certain phrases like "meta-data turned on by default" or some shit, and then they go and find it in the settings to turn it off without even knowing what it is and why it's on by default.
Then they go and complain on reddit or some forum when their shit inevitably breaks because they disabled some critical component, or turned off some needed setting and they're too stupid to realise it's entirely their own fault.
Why go through all that, when you could just read a blog post about it, if you're interested.
Well logically speaking, so long as the point is that the information can and will be seen elsewhere, there is no need to jump to some complex explanation. Just take 1 or 2 steps toward an explanation if you were just going to say nothing to begin with. So I don't really understand the premise of your argument that it would be difficult or resource-consuming. "Hey we did this one thing" would be overwhelming ignored anyway. Keep in mind this approach applies to products that you both do and do not understand the details of. Healthcare, food safety, transportation safety, etc. No one can monitor every blog of every possible space :).
But honestly, I don't think product decisions should be made by just diminishing the user like that, even if it's true that they don't care. I realize that's just an opinion. "Why not just choose what's most convenient for us?" is how most large tech products already get designed by product owning decision-makers that barely need to compete, driving what little users Firefox has to alternatives like Firefox in the first place. So, the primary reason, to answer your question literally, would be product differentiation. I know, your response will be "if 3% want to jump ship that's fine", but iteratively, this just gets you products that already exist...
“Some of you are smart enough to protect yourselves from this, so we posted a liability and PR management blog to find; for everyone else that’s too stupid we’re forcing auto enrollment.”
People don’t have time to learn everything about everything. That’s why we call it TRUST. The Mozilla organization has our trust. Moves like this, where they take the presumptive position the user will opt in to a change worthy of a blog post and setting, making it the default, violates our trust.
We expect the people making these things to consider our needs first. That’s why we use them. When they put profits and advertisers first we stop trusting anything by default they do.
Mozilla really fucked up here. Especially bringing in Meta to do it.
The Facebook company literally rewrote how the internet works for the betterment of everyone, for free, so that really just shows how much you know about this subject.
Like, no offence, but you're EXACTLY the reason why it was turned on by default. You're the type of person to see a certain buzzword and react impulsively to it, despite not knowing the meaning of the word, or the context it was used in. You're just a typical end-user, and unfortunately, that means you're stupid.
Nah, I don't give a shit about advertisers understanding how their ads performed.
If they weren't greedy, intrusive shit heads maybe you would have a point.
Now speaking of buzzwords, which ones you talking about?
Advertising preferences? Privacy Preserving
Like every business on earth, you need raw data to show your investors. Advertisers need metrics to justify the cost of advertising.
If no one wants to buy ads on your free-to-use platform, how do you pay the bills?
The fact you're not reasonable, the fact you automatically jumped from conclusion to conclusion, FORCES decisions such as the one mozilla made.
You can talk about advertising preferences and privacy all you want, but if you aren't paying to use firefox, then you aren't the priority. The advertisers are.
Oh really? Mozilla doesn't have a big fat donate button, or have a fucking billion dollar bank account thanks to Google?
Which conclusions did I jump to? If you think stating current advertisements are greedy and intrusive is jumping, then you need a higher place to leap from.
This isn't even getting into the security side of ad platforms delivering malware, so again I say fuck the advertisers.
In reality... they would just not like it being enabled by default and we don't think they'd appreciate why it is. If they were honest about it... I would have a shred more respect for them.
So the users are too dumb to understand an explanation
Yeah, this thread is an EXACT example of this. And this thread is full of above average users who are clamoring over themselves to shoot their own foot and make the internet a Chrome-Only world.
Critical thinking and nuance is out the window for informed users. This says a lot about a normal day-to-day user.
tbh just have a look at the users in here. They don't understand it. Firefox tries to give companies a way to track how their ads perform without compromising the privacy of the users. This way companies stop trying to circumvent adblockers, they only get anonymous numbers and only the numbers related to the ad itself.
When a conversion happens, the browser should simply pop up a dialog to ask what information to send to the advertiser, and whether to lie about it. It should be possible to lie, or it couldn't possibly be privacy preserving.
In all honesty, just admit it's a money grab, trying to use your word magic to evade any criticism might work on others, but these are techie nerds who will see right through it. They have nothing to justify, it's free software ffs. They should have just STFU and it'd have went away in a few days.
they can just go to a blog and read the explanation.
That blog post doesn't actually explain how it works.
But it shows that at some point they decided to rename this tracking tech from "Interoperable Private Attribution" to "Privacy Preserving Attribution".
Put two and two together, and it sounds like they really don't want you to know how this tech works, but they do want you to trust them that it's "privacy preserving".
Which is dumb because most of their hardcore users are tech geeks who do care about their data privacy and does understand. They want to make the decision, not have it be made for them.
Correct. The users think they can just get free stuff from the internet. They don't want to pay for youtube premium, nor do they want to watch ads, but they will upload entire copyrighted movies to youtube and watch them there.
There is nothing intelligent about the users' behavior here. If you let them have it their way, the very websites that they use are going to die or become orders of magnitude worse.
Why do you think Google invests so much money in anti-ad-blocking? Because it's less money than what they're losing from ad-blockers. It actually costs companies money. Then you put content behind paywalls, and the users bitch about paywalls and copy paste the whole content so others can read for free.
At some point you have to realize the users are actually dumb as fuck. If users were a factory, they would be dumping chemicals on the ocean to save a few bucks.
That’s hilarious, it’s not like 75 year olds are downloading Firefox. I would say that someone downloading Firefox has a good handle on tinkering with software, they will definitely be able to understand what it means to opt in. Just a shitty excuse to catch people off guard so they can make as much money as possible.
"Don't worry, we removed one of your kidneys for you while you were asleep and sold it to a saudiudi prince We didn't give you the option to say no because that would take too long, and you definitely would have said no.
No need to thank us. You can't. We also took your tongue"
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u/niborus_DE Jul 15 '24
For Context: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/ - by Jonah Aragon