WTH, Mozilla 🤦🏼♀️
Also, fuck you, dude:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again
Submitted 4 months ago by MissingInteger@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
Comments
c0smokram3r@midwest.social 4 months ago
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 4 months ago
“You’re too dumb to understand so we make decisions for you”
Fuck that condescending prick with a pineapple.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 4 months ago
Chill; he’s probably not talking about you. He is talking about “your mom”. If you want her to use Firefox, it’s got to be simple.
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task.
IMO that just means they barely understand it themselves. Anyone that understands something with an amount of proficiency can explain it to child and it’ll make sense, given they don’t use technical nomenclature.
solrize@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The difficulty is in spinning it to sound non invasive. And of course takes a level of self corruption to even want to do that, since PPA is invasive and you have to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
adarza@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
i read that as more like “nobody would opt in if it was opt-in”.
kbal@fedia.io 4 months ago
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It's not that difficult to explain. "When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you've seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N"
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I've seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I've blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We'll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they'll reconsider.
kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 4 months ago
If you can’t explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don’t truly understand it.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 4 months ago
Bah, that’s just a lame, hot take.
Tonnes of things are really complicated to explain because they’re complicated.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry
No thanks, I’ll pass
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Meta bad!!! Wait until you realise that React is built by Meta. Are you gonna stop using website thata are built on React?
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I wish I could. Every time I hear about a React app, it’s some godforsaken ad choked nightmare of a “web 2.0” site that just makes the internet painful to use. I understand it may be possible to write a performant and usable GUI with it, but you never hear of such things
queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Programming languages isn’t adware made by a company that has horrible track records for respecting privacy. If you love Facebook so much, stay there and take your sealioning with you.
tabular@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Browsers are an unsustainable mess of reckless feature creap. At some point we may all transition from using websites at all.
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I mean people freaking out about this don’t actually understand what’s happening and why Mozilla is doing it. Mozilla is trying to build a new privacy-based advertising. The feature needs to be opt-in by default in order to have a chance to become mainstream. Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is. Most people don’t change default settings. So they can never get websites to try this better technology if their own users aren’t adopting it. I also hate the attitude of this community they think Firefox is built for them(ultra tech savy, extremely privacy concious) when 99% of their users are not these things. If you want ultra privacy, go use Libreawolf or whatever. Those solutions are for that type of person. Firefox and Mozilla builds for the average person, which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the feature. (Anyone says otherwise is in a tech bubble and haven’t seen normal people interacting with their computers).
fin@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
99% of their users are not these things
I don’t think so. People using Firefox are freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy. And if Firefox should lose those people, it will truly be the end
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 4 months ago
99% was referring to them not being both tech savy and extremely privacy conscious. I don’t disagree that the appeal of Firefox is better privacy. I just don’t think the average user is looking to absolutely remove every drop of data collected. I mean just look at the default Firefox homepage it comes with. It has sponsored shortcuts and sponsored stories. They put them there because the average user actually clicks on them. If everyone was privacy conscious like you say, they would turn off the feature and Firefox wouldn’t keep it because they don’t make money from it. But that’s obviously not the case.
mrvictory1@lemmy.world 4 months ago
FF users include both normal people and freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy.
Don_alForno@feddit.de 4 months ago
Privacy based advertizing:
-
Develop ad
-
Think about what websites your target demographic will probably frequent. (Be creative, dear marketing person! You can do it! This is the essence of what you’re getting paid for!)
-
Pay those sites to display your ad
Done.
Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is.
No. Why? It’s simple. They are collecting data I don’t want the ad networks to have instead of the ad networks and give it to the ad networks. That’s only more private than the status quo if I’m okay with them to have this data and trust them to handle it responsibly. Which I have no reason to.
which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the Feature.
See explanation above. That’s not too complicated to explain to a person that managed to turn on the computer. It only gets complicated when you try to follow the mental gymnastics you need to think this feature adds privacy for anybody.
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 4 months ago
This exactly. We don’t need some in-between “compromise”.
-
Sanctus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
All your heroes are dead.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
"The worst thing that can happen to your people is for them to fall into the hands of a hero"
- Dr Pardot Kines
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 months ago
To disable:
user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);Dlolor@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Alternatively you can do the same through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Website Advertising Preferences and uncheck “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement”
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Yup, but that’s already mentioned in the article. Thought I’d give people the exact userpref, so they can modify their custom
user.jsif they have one.
viking@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Done. Thanks!
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 months ago
From the article, quoting a Firefox dev explaining the decision:
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption.
In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision.
puts on They Live glasses
@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca If we had made it opt in, then not a single human being on the planet would have enabled it, and we didn’t want that
hummingbird@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 4 months ago
Explaination from the article:
The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser’s server. The “advertising network” only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!
kersplomp@programming.dev 4 months ago
Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.
HKayn@dormi.zone 4 months ago
Because otherwise you’d be supporting the Chromium monopoly, and that’s the biggest sin imaginable in the Fediverse.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 4 months ago
Sin? I just want there to be competitors.
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 4 months ago
I’m not in favor of talking about the Fediverse like it is a data monopoly like META or reddit.
DJDarren@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
Safari user sitting quietly in the corner
theherk@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because it is FOSS and responsible for many great contributions to apis that make the web what it is. It has history that goes way back. It has been decently transparent, certainly when compared to its closest competitors. It isn’t Google. It has a massive library of extensions. They aren’t planning to deprecate manifest v2.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like other browsers and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from the servo reboot. But Firefox is bread and butter and there is often drummed up nonsense about it.
towerful@programming.dev 4 months ago
Mozilla also maintains fantastic JS docs
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 4 months ago
So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?
Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 months ago
Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’ve tried explaining to the Firefox cult that they do a lot of tracking and telemetry by default but they just hurl insults. Time to leave the cult.
sturlabragason@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I get a lot of beef for Brave. Any viable alternatives that aren’t derivatives of Chromium or FF but are maintained?
girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Firefox forks seem to be the best option. Chromium-based browsers still report to Google unless you basically break them.
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 4 months ago
GNOME Web is mostly ok. It breaks on a few sites and doesn’t have easy extension support.
mrvictory1@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Webkit based browsers like safari and gnome web are your only options if you don’t want derivatives.
fin@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
tracking and telemetryby Firefox is not even comparable to that of chrome. Google knows you better than you. Firefox’s telemetry used to be solely for improving user experience, and not ads and bullshit.Now that Firefox’s gonna show us some ads, I think I have to get away from it as a protest
uzay@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Default Firefox is becoming more and more unusable. I hope distros will start switching to something like Librewolf as the default browser in the future or heavily (and visibly) change the default Firefox config themselves.
fin@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?
PassingThrough@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?
Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 months ago
Just use LibreWolf; I’m not up to speed on this stuff but I more or less believe the hype that it will protect my privacy simply by taking Firefox and adding an ad blocker for me and disabling all the shit for me
Toes@ani.social 4 months ago
Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀
swayevenly@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?
jabathekek@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
IMO it’s the option in
Data collectioncalledMarketing data. It doesn’t say it’s PPA outright, but it sounds like the same sort of thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯reversebananimals@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s a desktop only feature, it hasn’t been built into mobile I believe
PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
Well shit. Firefox is still better because it doesn’t have the backdoor Google uses to catch and then block YouTube users from blocking ads. For now.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
It’s all on Ladybird now.
NerdyPopRocks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Does Firefox explain what measures they’ve taken to protect their aggregation servers? If so, this is a perfectly fine and practical method for privacy preservation
NerdyPopRocks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Looks like they are using a Prio based protocol. If they are using Prio2+, I think this article is likely overblown.
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.
If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!
cley_faye@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.
I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
Wow. I 100% agree with you here.
There’s an element of trust when you buy a product. You trust that the product itself isn’t malicious and is intended to help you in some way. E.g. “This food is safely prepared and won’t poison me.” Harvesting user data and advertising really violate that trust.
Though it is worth noting that we don’t buy web browsers. We simply use them for “free“.
Don_alForno@feddit.de 4 months ago
“Our hope is, that if we transfer the bank robber some of our money in advance, they’ll not come in and rob all of it.”
No! Jail the fucker!
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
While I appreciate your sentiment, this just isn’t realistic in the current state of the world. First, you need to make these kind of tactics illegal enough to incarcerate a person. Second, you need to expand and enforce this law globally. We definitely need this level of global cooperation, but are also soooo far away from achieving it
ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today 4 months ago
I agree.
Imagine a world where Chrome doesn’t exist and instead Firefox + privacy preserving attribution is the default for all of the people who won’t listen to your reasons why they shouldn’t use chrome or say “I don’t need privacy, I have nothing to hide”.
It seems like Mozilla is trying to do the browser equivalent of shifting the overton window and I’m for that.
However I’ll be monitoring them very very closely.
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
Ya this is definitely one to maintain some skepticism about. People are criticizing the API’s security in other posts.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 4 months ago
You’re not wrong.
Whether you like it or not a lot of the internet relies on advertisement to work.
Some sites can introduce subscription fees and they can get out of it (I’d personally like that), some sites aren’t really sites but just optimising towards ad revenue (with all the shady practices that follow), but most produce valuable content for their users and rely on advertisement to sustain themselves.
So if we want to find a way to support that large center group, without enabling the crappy bottom tier, we have to make profiling safer. Well we don’t have to, we can dream of a safer, better world and try to bring it about by creating revolutions, but if we are practical, creating something that enables what the advertisement industry would like, without destroying what the users would like, is a far more realistic approach to making the world better.
ahal@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
You’re absolutely correct.
Some folks here just want to ban ads outright, but don’t stop to think what that would mean. The one that frightens me is what happens to the already crumbling news industry when they additionally lose all advertising revenue? And don’t say subscriptions, because those won’t come close to cutting it. Maybe a couple outlets like the Times could survive, but all the others are going under.
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
Exactly. There is a general need to destroy and rebuild a system but it is often dangerous and costly. Especially with regard to a system of laws and government. Improving the system more naturally is far more safe and more achievable at smaller scales.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 4 months ago
Doesn’t work with total cookie protection anyway.
Lodra@programming.dev 4 months ago
Exactly. It sounds like Mozilla is trying to protect those that aren’t willing or able to protect themselves. It’s a noble reason to do just a little bit of evil. This is roughly the source of my mixed feelings on the subject.