… I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job …
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by ‘we are not a monopoly’ Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if ‘we’ accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
… first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.
Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.
So, serious question: How is this good for me?
Edit: typo
advertising isn’t going to go away
That is certainly true for the moment, but IMHO that is not really an argument in this case:
- Advertisement can simply show me me some advertisement w/o spying on me. (Effectiveness of targeted advertisement is AFAIK highly controversial anyway.)
- My operating system does not have to spy on me and my browser certainly not.
- Mozillas BS arguments are just the ‘story told’, obviously they want to make money via advertisement and be the man-in-the-middle. I assume it is their legal right to do so and they can pursue the business model they like, but I do not have to like it.
- Again, advertisers will simply use this as an additional source of information about users for real time bidding, and not wind down other methods of information gathering, so this is only bad for me w/o any upsides.
- Mozilla is showing it is willing to sell it’s user data out this way (and silently do so), what are the next steps, what will happen with the next updates?
… and I happily have donated and will donate/pay money to/for websites and software I like/use and will happily accept business models dying which depend on selling my data out.
One of the main points of using Open Source operating systems and software is, that I have the freedom to use my own hardware the way I like w/o being up-sold or harassed by advertisement.
It does not collect any more information about you. It provides far less information than pretty much every ad is already collecting, and that information is anonymized. It does not affect ad blocking solutions.
So, serious question: what are you not understanding here?
… as already mentioned above:
- This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
- Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
- It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
- This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.
