Lemdro.id

33 points

2 months ago

Firefox stands as the lesser of two evils.

The problem is that for the past 8 months, Mozilla has been accelerating making Firefox more evil, and if it continues at this trajectory, it might catch up to Google.

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Possibly linux@lemmy.zip

5 points

2 months ago

Use forks

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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1 point

2 months ago

I’m not really sure what you mean. Firefox is pretty good, and I honestly think the privacy-friendly ads thing is a good initiative. If you’re going to block ads anyway, it won’t impact you, and if you won’t block ads, having them be more privacy-friendly is a good thing. As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will), I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.

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1 point

2 months ago

As long as Mozilla doesn’t sell my browsing data (and there’s no indication they are or will)…

Mozilla thinks so poorly of PPA data collection that they didn’t tell their users, and then basically said their users were too stupid to be told. Consider, they hid this from their user base then Google hid “privacy sandbox” from theirs.

If you don’t consider this an indication of Mozilla’s bad will, and I’m not sure why you would ignore it, Mozilla FakeSpot already sells private data to ad companies. Directly.

…I’m all for harm-reducing features/settings.

Which this objectively is not. In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry? Especially because this is a proprietary technique that works on 3% or less of browsers, whereas advertisers that cared about privacy could have just used different URLs in their ads to do their own private telemetry.

At best, this introduces data funneling through Mozilla corporate servers for no functional purpose.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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1 point

2 months ago

They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes, hence why the media picked up on it. And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.

FakeSpot

That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser. I honestly don’t know much about it, and their privacy policy isn’t appealing, so I won’t use it. If it becomes part of Firefox by default, I’ll disable it.

In what universe are advertisers going to use this instead of, not in addition to, other telemetry?

What telemetry is this providing? AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.

And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads. Mozilla has some anti-tracking features, and there’s a significant subset of Firefox users that block ads out of principle of avoiding tracking. If websites want to get some of that advertising revenue, they’ll comply. That benefits all Firefox users, because some sites may choose to use this method of targeted ads, which still provides the site with ad revenue without providing the advertisers with details on their customers.

That’s the idea here. It’s not going to happen on day 1, but having the capability means Mozilla can pilot it and see if websites are interested. And it’s possible Mozilla’s ads are more relevant because they have access to browsing history, not just whatever advertisers were able to figure out from their network of ads.

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1 point

2 months ago

They didn’t really hide it, they just didn’t advertise it. It was in the release notes

Which the average person doesn’t read. That’s how you hide it.

They hit it worse than Google. You know, Google. The advertising company, Google.

They hit it worse than Brave.

And on release, there was a checkbox in the normal settings to opt-out, so it’s honestly not that bad.

That checkbox should have been unchecked and not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering. The same way Google (as previously mentioned) also wraps their extra data gathering in the label of “privacy.”

The terrible rollout, and the terrible corporate response, should be enough to give any person pause about trusting Mozilla. And in slurping up private telemetry, that is what Mozilla Corp requires from you: even more trust.

When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?

AFAIK, Mozilla isn’t providing any kind of personalized info, it’s merely aggregated data.

That’s the sneaky part about Mozilla’s careful marketing scheme. They collect data that is personal, they just pinky promise that they won’t release anything but aggregate data once they’ve finished slicing and dicing this private data.

FakeSpot

That’s an opt-in extension, it’s not part of the core browser.

I’m talking about the corporate subsidiary that sells private data directly to advertisers. It sells browsing and search history. It is part of Mozilla, and I see very little separating its privacy practices from everything people unknowingly pipe into Mozilla servers through Firefox.

And the reason they’d pick this is to get access to privacy-minded people who would otherwise block their ads, but may choose to exempt these ads.

Again, if advertisers can already reach privacy-minded people without using Mozilla Corp as an intermediary, why wouldn’t they do that and reach 100% of people? In what universe does a browser with a dwindling user base encourage anybody to use their proprietary tracking solution?

Here’s a chart.

Technology	PPA	Topics	Using different links
Corporate creator	Facebook	Google	none
Needs you to trust 3rd party?	Yes (Mozilla)	Yes (Google)	No
~% browsers it works on	<3%	>60%	100%
Guaranteed privacy increase?	No	No	No

If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don’t trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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1 point

2 months ago

not given a label that hides the true intent of the data gathering

I think it’s pretty clear, the checkbox reads: “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.” There’s also a link that explains what that means.

The real issue is that there should’ve been an advertisement that the option exists. I found it by reading release notes (I’m a nerd and am interested), but as you said, a lot of people don’t read those. However, the impact here is also pretty low, since AFAIK companies aren’t actually using this ATM, and generally speaking the data should stay with Mozilla. The official doc says:

A small number of sites are going to test this and provide feedback to inform our standardization plans, and help us understand if this is likely to gain traction.

I disagree that it should’ve been unchecked, because that completely kills the whole point of this pilot program. Perhaps it should only be there for people who have allow being part of surveys.

When a company goes behind your back, gets caught, and then tells you to trust them, do you trust them?

I don’t think they’ve done that. I don’t think there was anything malicious here, they just didn’t think it was relevant to inform all users about, probably because only a handful of sites are using it.

So they haven’t lost my trust. I was much more frustrated with their Pocket rollout than this, because Pocket really felt like it should’ve been a separate, opt-in service.

I will agree that Mozilla has made some questionable choices in the past, but this one doesn’t really stand out to me. Maybe I trust them too much when they say no personalized data leaves my machine (but I have yet to see any evidence that it does).

It sells browsing and search history

But only if you use the extension. Mozilla doesn’t collect that data w/o the extension being installed. If I opt-in (or not opt-out) to the PPA feature, that data will not go to that subsidiary, nor will it be associated with me in any way if it’s ever provided to third parties. At least that’s my understanding.

If you trust the advertiser, they can do it on their own. If you don’t trust the advertiser, why would you trust them to partner with a data slurping company?

Mozilla isn’t an advertiser. Google and Brave are. So Mozilla is far more likely to limit what access to data advertisers have, so I’ll trust them way more than Brave or Google.

Instead of removing it, I think Mozilla should expose some tools so ad-blockers can optionally allow privacy-respecting ads with some metadata (maybe that exists?).

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