I’ve read the “learn more” bit now and I’m going to leave it switched on. (although I use uBlock anyway 😅)
I think this is a legitimate attempt to ‘fix’ the internet. It seems only very basic information on interactions with ads is recorded by the browser, and then it is anonymised. As an example, the advertiser should only receive counts of how many people bought a product after seeing a particular ad. I don’t think they can see what webpage anyone in particular came from, but maybe they can see that: 11% percentage of visitors came from example.com/some-page
Presumably the anonymised data is only provided once the pool is fairly large and wouldn’t show 100% of visitors came from cornhub when you only had one visitor 🤷♂️ Obviously websites will always see an IP address.
The idea is for this to substitute for traditional, more invasive, tracking. I think it may one day achieve that.
A warning though: I only just started reading about this.
I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments
Before people completely lose their mind: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Why is Mozilla coming from the position that what advertisers want is reasonable or acceptable in any shape or form? The advertisement industry existed for centuries without the ability to spy on people and they were doing just fine.
Edit: this being opt-out instead of opt-in also violates the GDPR.
How does this violate the GDPR? It increases privacy and stops advertisers tracking everything you do. This seems to be a good thing.
Advertisers have always been interested in where their ads are seen and whether they convert to purchases. A common example is vouchers, which will tell the advertiser exactly this (10p off, customer redeems, store returns to advertiser, advertiser knows where you got the voucher from/where you saw the advert, where you bought the product - exactly what Firefox is trying to tell them)
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Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
Mozilla can’t send user data to an “aggregation service” without explicit consent, no matter how much propaganda they use to explain it.
But it’s OK to send more - and probably PII - tracking data directly to the website without consent?
Also no. But 2 wrongs don’t make a right.
You are speaking like there are only two alternatives and none of them involves following the law.
In which case I suggest you file a GDPR violation against all web browsers, as by default they will be allowing tracking and sending data to advertisers.
One thing is allowing the other is actively collecting and processing the data.
Holy crap that actually sounds genuinely good for meeting the advertisers desires without giving up user privacy
Ah yes, the reasonable solution to deal with someone cosplaying as a private Stasi is to voluntarily submit a report of your activities /s
The middle ground is not always a reasonable position.
Ok makes sence but im still relying on the agrigation service acting in good faith. I dont trust anything that isnt my computer. Even with context this is a bad look and not helping Firefox’s cause when people start screaming about it without context.
Come on guys lets just fix fingerprinting ik the standard is to make every device identical but thats never gonna work and sounds like an easy way to track anyone who hardens more than default settings. We need to have eveey browser generate different data for every test for everything makw so much noise the signal is imperceptible.
Having this standard means other browser or tech can adopt this technology too and is not limited to Firefox users. This is not just a Firefox thing. And one can still turn it off. The more browser support and enable this functionality, the better, if it means having ads without tracking a user.
If this takes off, it could really make the web better as we know it today. This means websites using this functionality would look like good websites and people prefer it and would get more recommendations (potentially). There would be less reason to block ads, so the websites can earn their money, without identifying us. And without trying to find ways to identify us, without getting blocked, without looking bad. I truly believe this middle ground is key.
A little bit unrelated at first glance, but a related quote from Gabe Newell: “Piracy is not a problem of price, but a problem of service.” And I think this goes in a similar direction here. If we provide a better service to advertisements agencies or sites, then they might use it. And that’s good for the web.
Cheers, I was getting salty reading the op
Twitter and Mastodon with their short message chains only amplifies losing context, especially if the original post does not include all necessary information or source links.
Yep this.
It’s gotten to the point where a character limit is itself a seriously toxic part of big-social social media, up there with algorithms and shitty moderation choices. But all of the Twitter people don’t see it.
Sure there are threads through reply chains. No one reads the chain. The first post is all most will see. Context collapse and superficiality is inevitable with this simple constraint. The fediverse should move on. Sadly, mastodon is the only platform still dedicated to it and they’re 80% of the fediverse.
If you like short funny quips and shit posts, that’s fine, there’s no character minimum! With long character limits, short quips still abound. Instead, when necessary, you can opt in to longer form text when necessary.
I hate to break it to you, but the character limit being integrated into the UI is inconsequential against the general preferences of humankind. Your 3 paragraph, well thought out statement is already too long to garner the upvotes a 2 word post will get in reply regardless of how good a post it is.
The number of people I’ve come across who also dislike the character limit, the number of platforms that don’t have it, the number of times people write long microblogging threads and the prior and continued existence of the “blogosphere” count against this defeatist pessimism IMO.
The truly dark take here, IMO, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a medium’s configuration to shape not just the content and culture on it (that’s obvious) but the way its users come to think.
This happens in every major mastodon thread. Someone claims something without even bothering to research it like the person below did. They make an incredibly big deal about it with tons of claims (which are almost all untrue) and then it gains traction and anyone who doesn’t bother to research now believes something completely untrue.
Must be an account thing because mine is unchecked.
edit: ah yah, today’s update added it.
well fuck.
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ah yah, today’s update added it.
well fuck.
Excuse me while I go and click that ‘learn more’ button…
Before that don’t forget to voluntary submit a summary report of your activity to the NSA.
It’s sad to watch them become what they stood against.
NICE TRY FEDZ
Someone tell me pls which browsers are developed by actually decent people? I’ll switch
Firefox is a good example
The article is a huge misrepresentation and the author is an idiot.
Sure. Firefox is developed by lovely people.
You aren’t happy with your selection of free software and still have the audacity to call the people behind that names? You didn’t even read the article did you.
Be a “decent” person yourself and start your own browser. We’ll happily judge.
If you’ve already read through this and understand what it means and are still worried about your privacy, I would recommend you switch to LibreWolf - it takes all the best practices of hardening Firefox for security and works out of the box. Unfortunately, this means you can’t play certain videos, it doesn’t auto-update, and some - likely many - websites will break/not work. This is the price to pay for true privacy. If you don’t want that, just keep using Firefox.
I’ve been using Librewolf for years and pages not working are extremely rare.
That and the pages that don’t work are trying to force a fingerprinting/tracking technique you shouldn’t want to allow anyways.
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Or they use WebGL. I keep a chromium install just for that.
