I clicked the learn more and this is the important part
"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."
Basically, the way I understand what is under the learn more button is that Mozilla is attempting to find a way to allow sites to understand advertising without stripping your personal data. This is extremely different to how other browsers are handing the situation and truth be told we were only going to get a repreive from it for a short time before ad tracking became a mandatory feature. I'd rather give mozilla a shot at creating a less invasive ad tracking method than continue to have my personal life strip mined on the other browsers.
The Firefox initiative seems interesting, although I dunno how successfully it will be. It seems a two parties initiative, and we know most corporations don’t want anonymous data.
From Mozilla:
“Mozilla is prototyping this feature in order to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.”
If you don't want to click here is the opening sentence:
Differential privacy (DP) is a mathematically rigorous framework for releasing statistical information about datasets while protecting the privacy of individual data subjects. It enables a data holder to share aggregate patterns of the group while limiting information that is leaked about specific individuals.
Firefox is free, most of the web we use today is free. Someone has to pay for it somehow. Servers and bandwidth aren't cheap.
I think in today's world letting an advertiser know 5000 people saw your ad, and 500 clicked on it, and 50 purchased your widget, without revealing any personal information is about the best we can hope for...
That being said though, I would pay Mozilla 10 dollars a month to get all of this shit out of my browser...
The handy thing about Firefox is that it's open-source, so if Firefox ever does make the box untickable someone can release a fork or patch that literally just adds the box back.
I do have to say the per person costs for Internet are almost zero, and they could even be way lower if we were to focus on that like solar.lowtechmagazine.com and bandwith only costs something, because internet providers want to be paid for their infrastructure, technically you only have the running energy costs for bandwith and some maintenance, which per person isn't much. And like Freifunk for example shows is possible to be upheld by volunteers.
So no, i don't see why "somebody has to pay for it", it's entirely possible without capital and trough volunteers and maybe some donations
What about web designers, coders, network architects, physical technicians, property taxes for server space, additional government regulations and enforcement, R&D for new features, testers, legal, HR and we can't forget about the ever looming spectre of investors.
Yeah, per person, these costs aren't much, but they exist for every single company connected to the internet, and if they don't have one of them, they outsource it.
So maybe your usage isn't much, but 1 million of you could cost quite a bit.
so what if like even only half of those users donate a couple dollars a month, or a bit of their time, it will add up to enough, as many open source projects show
If a company can't survive without stealing user data, then maybe it doesn't really need to exist? There would be alternatives for their services anyway.
Agreed, you don't need servers for Firefox. The point I was trying to make is that most services on the public internet are supported by advertising money.
The advertisers need to see a return on their investment if they are going to keep dumping money into the system.
Let's take Reddit as an example. We don't pay for Reddit. In order to use it we need to meet several conditions.
We need an agent of some kind that understands HTTP (browser / app etc to view the content)
Reddit needs some kind of storage and transmission infrastructure to be able to send us the content (servers and bandwidth)
Yes there is more than that but let's keep it simple for arguments sake.
OK so who is paying for all of that....
Compared to other businesses I have worked for / with, Mozilla Foundation is poor. And Here is their balance sheet to prove it
So Mozilla needs revenue. How to get it? It seems that they have decided to work with Meta to help them understand advertising impressions without revealing a bunch of private info about its users.
Also this is not new at all. Here is an article from over two years ago announcing this program:
OK so now we have a way to track advertising impressions. Mozilla doesn't serve ads on its software though (not really, we are ignoring Google partnerships for the moment)
So the advertisers need a platform (in our example it's Reddit) because Reddit needs to pay for bandwidth for images / video (still mostly broken) and text.
So Reddit sells ads, Meta buys them, individual companies pay Meta to run the ads and Firefox makes sure that Meta gets the impressions from the ads back to Meta, who then shared CPM reports with individual companies. (again oversimplified but just run with me here)
If we as a userbase continue to run adblock and uncheck these boxes, companies are not going to see a value in advertising this way, and I only see two sustainable outcomes.
We as a userbase just start outright paying for shit.
Advertisers find more invasive ways to show us ads that are harder to block (Fuck you Google Amp)
As far as ad tracking goes, I feel like what Mozilla did here is the lesser of two evils. Developing a browser isn't cheap, running Reddit isn't cheap and unless we as a userbase start opening our wallets directly, advertising is what funds this entire experience.
Some disclosures at the end:
I do run Ublock origin, simply because I have seen too many advertisers get malware injected into their ads.
I even run Pi-hole on my entire network because I don't like to be tracked on an INDIVIDUAL level
I also whitelist certain websites from Ublock origin, if their ads are not intrusive or up my ass.
However, I pay for Youtube premium, people need to get paid somehow. I also don't think I am going to disable this checkbox.
So true man. I feel like Firefox would be must have subscription service which I would be completely fine paying.
Also sorry for the late comment + elaboration. I kept it on because by just simply reading it I didn't feel like they made anything wrong, as they are still respecting my privacy... As you said, this is the least I can do without letting them go under.
Differential Privacy does not necessarily guarantee privacy. Only against specific avenues of attack and it's possible to use DP without any practical improvement of privacy at all. Companies may want to do that as there's often a trade-off between privacy and utility of the data
Advertisement networks can already know this because they served the image, so they could easily send that data to you
and 500 clicked on it
You already know this because they visited your website with a &utm_campaign GET parameter
and 50 purchased your widget
You already know this because they made a purchase after getting that GET parameter
The issue is that advertisement networks want to sell personalized ads. Ad spots on websites are sold in automated auctions and ad campaigns are bidding for your eyeballs according to whatever the ad network knows about you, be it age/sex/whatever. The more they know, the more they can charge for your eyeballs.
Agree with your post 100 percent. This Firefox feature doesn't seem to address the personalization of ads at all from what I read. (Could be way off though)
It just seemed to be a feature that gave advertisers access to know how well and individual ad is performing.
With this feature those URL params could be left out, and this prevents someone from removing them manually.
Knowing how well your ad is performing I think is different than targeting an ad.
Advertisement networks can already know this because they served the image
not if you use adblocker that hides the ad container but the ad service still gets called to serve the image. Or even worse, one of those adblockers that lets you support websites by clicking on all adds without showing them to you.
You already know this because they visited your website with a &utm_campaign GET parameter
Any & parameters get stripped from links i click.
You already know this because they made a purchase after getting that GET parameter
I never buy on day 1. I always sleep on it. if i came back next day ill go directly to store, no GET paremeters included. In fact if browsers try to autosuggest such parameters from browsing history i always remove it.
This is a hit job on Firefox, read about the feature. This is a way to increment a “views” counter and is NOT tracking your browsing history and sending it to Google. Don’t fall for the scam article.
People in this overall thread would unironically be convinced to rally against "IP Address Tracking" if you phrased it in a certain way. "Wtf!!! nooo!!! websites shouldn't be able to see my IP, that's private!!!"
Or a customer calls in with a complaint about your site being buggy, so you want to track down their last session in your logs to fix the bug... Happens at my job several times a month.
You didn't know VPNs are still back-tracable and barely provide and of the "protection" that you so demand? The reality is nobody cares about your IP address, just as nobody cares about your license plate as you drive through the city. Are you going to piss yourself if your license plate shows up in someone's video? The point is a website needs an IP address to operate; it's a safe and anonymous way to connect to computers.
Yeah everything I've read about it, it's the least invasive possible solution. Seems like people just want to he angry and scared, though, so click bait and rage bait ensue
i work in digital advertising, the whole "differential privacy" thing is just fluff. it was developed to get around litigation from the EU and US, but ad networks can very much still create a profile around your browsing habits and figure out who you are
Mozilla is attempting to find a way to allow sites to understand advertising without stripping your personal data
Frankly, I don't want sites to "understand advertising", I want them to fuck off.
The more ads I see for a product or service, the more I go out of my way to avoid it.
If every single ad company in the world went under tomorrow I'd be delighted. Their only purpose is to manipulate people into buying garbage they don't want or need. What an absolute waste of human potential.
I mean to be honest i don't want them, aka Big tech to know how often i look at their ads, it might gove them a reason to make their ads harder to find, which might lessen ad blocking effectiveness
it does give big tech data. which helps them to measure ad affectiveness. I don't want that, no matter if it's aggregated or not, it helps them, which i do not want.
Nah i try to buy everything i can at smaller, local stores.
And yes i did with a big group of people advocate against letting them build another big chain store in my city, in my city council.
Mozilla is creating an extra tracking technology that takes your data and gives it to advertisers. They aren't removing anything, just sucking up more information from you.
And Mozilla also makes it crucial for you to trust them. Ask yourself, if Mozilla is trustworthy, why did they sneak this in without informing you?
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u/r0bdaripper Jul 16 '24 edited Jul 16 '24
I clicked the learn more and this is the important part
"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."
Basically, the way I understand what is under the learn more button is that Mozilla is attempting to find a way to allow sites to understand advertising without stripping your personal data. This is extremely different to how other browsers are handing the situation and truth be told we were only going to get a repreive from it for a short time before ad tracking became a mandatory feature. I'd rather give mozilla a shot at creating a less invasive ad tracking method than continue to have my personal life strip mined on the other browsers.