Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog
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LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598

Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

    • parpol@programming.dev
      854·
      1 month ago

      Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that’s also not what is happening. They’re trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.

      I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don’t care about ads at least don’t get tracked.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
        167·
        1 month ago

        They are not trying to “replace” cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.

        Then there’s the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.

        This comment alone:

        “As part of this work, we are also committing to being transparent and open about our intent and plans prior to launching tests or features.”

        … means they have no intention to be honest about shit.

        • parpol@programming.dev
          141·
          1 month ago

          It doesn’t track users. It collects anonymous statistics and assign them to a unique ID without storing any other information about the user.

          And it IS meant to replace cookies, but you can’t just replace them all at once and disable the legacy cookies. It is going to have a gradual transition.

          And they did tell us about this many months ago.

          • tiddy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            131·
            1 month ago

            I hate to say but technically collecting statistics is non-anonymous identifiable tracking, especially in this age where theres so many datasets companies can coorelate them to

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
            82·
            1 month ago

            Hahaha, because data can never be de-anonymised, right?

            Oh, yea, that’s repeatedly been show to not be true.

            • parpol@programming.dev
              12·
              1 month ago

              That depends entirely on what kind of data is stored and how often a new unique ID is created, and that’s something users can seize control over.

          • underisk@lemmy.ml
            1·
            1 month ago

            It tracks anonymous statistics, without my express consent, for the benefit of a third party. I do not care if it exists to replace cookies, because I’m not even convinced that cookies need to exist at all anymore. What utility do they provide to the actual person using the browser that can’t be accomplished through some other more modern API? If the only functionality left to replace is tracking people then maybe just deprecate them and move on.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
          51·
          1 month ago

          Didn’t we go through all this like a month ago?

          Why are people still excusing Mozilla for this?

          • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
            3·
            1 month ago

            Right? They’ve done some good stuff over the years, but that does not eliminate the fact that they have chosen to be part of all the enshitification going on.