mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social
Attached: 1 image So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214 You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup. If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*
  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    … I don’t know of this is satire or not.

    • There is now a feature labeled “Privacy-preserving ad measurement” near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
      • kersplomp@programming.dev
        0·
        4 months ago

        Yes. The problem with cookies was that they could be used to track and identify you. If this can’t do that, then what’s the issue?

        • minoscopede@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          The problem is supporting ad networks.

          Edit: /s because apparently it wasn’t obvious. Anonymous is obviously better.

        • Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          4 months ago

          Most data can be de-anonymized with some clever tricks. I don’t know about Mozilla but the others definitely try to keep it just anonymous enough to later be correlated with the rest of your profile.

          Edit: typos

      • Auzy@beehaw.org
        01·
        4 months ago

        You’re actually wrong. They did when they started.

        I know because I donated

        The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

        If you don’t like them making money to support development, you’re more than welcome to work full time on developing it for free

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            0·
            4 months ago

            Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.

            Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
            01·
            4 months ago

            Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door

            No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”

            15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them

          • Auzy@beehaw.org
            01·
            4 months ago

            Rich guy?

            Presumably that is about Mitchell Baker… A woman… who was there since the beginning when the company was failing…

            The new CEO is also a woman and a temp CEO, who I’m guessing will again be replaced by an existing employee. Which guy are you referring to?

            What browser projects are you assisting with or donating to?

            Are you assisting with any open source projects at all?

            The biggest problem with the oss community is that as a developer, you need to accept always that you’ll get treated like absolute dirt by the community.

            One of my projects went FrontPage on many major Linux sites, and I ended up dropping it because I got tired of the abuse.

            You’ll get plenty of people contributing nothing to your project or competing ones, but they’ll tell you the 50 different ways you suck

            I donated back when Firefox was in beta. They were a dying company back then.

            Are you saying open source developers shouldn’t be rewarded at all?

        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          4 months ago

          Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.

          I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.

          • Auzy@beehaw.org
            0·
            4 months ago

            Yeah. Maybe I’m just old (I’m 40).

            I would be happy to donate. But, the reality is… donations don’t work in my experience. One of my projects went FrontPage on all the major tech sites (and even was mentioned in Linux format magazine).

            I got $300 in donations.

            $250 was from a person I knew…

            Backend projects often get screwed more, and I guess you probably need to hope you get supported by companies like Redhat ultimately. This may be why in my case. But backend projects always have people dissing them (frontend projects just need to look good and markety)

            I think what’s more important is that it’s open source to be honest. We’re actually lucky we still have Mozilla honestly.

            In Mozilla browser days (after Netscape), id imagine it would have been a struggle to get a good pay. The people still there I suspect took a massive risk, and could have moved to lots of other companies like Google instead quite easily

            I think they deserve to get rewarded…

  • ooterness@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    You can disable this “feature”:

    1. Visit about:config

    2. Set “dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled” to false

  • unskilled5117@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.

    The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.

    PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.

    Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

    1. Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
    2. If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
    3. 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”.
    4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

    This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.

    PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

    This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.

    • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      4 months ago

      My question is why Mozilla is trying to help advertisers at all instead of telling them to fuck off.

      • ahal@lemmy.ca
        0·
        4 months ago

        Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.

        Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:

        1. Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
        2. Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.

        What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.

        And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.

        • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          4 months ago

          Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already.

          Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.

          Absolute nonsense. How does rejecting ads or even including a default adblocker make Firefox any less relevant? I would hope most people would be more than happy to use a platform free from ads.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
            0·
            4 months ago

            Have you used the Internet before? Or used it without a clue how services are usually paid for? You sound a bit clueless. The day they do that, a lot of websites stop working and nagging the user to turn off adblock, which I see all the time (as an advanced user who expects it). If I was a normie who didn’t understand this it might be quite confusing. This is obviously the reason basically no mainstream browser has done this or would do it.

            • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
              0·
              4 months ago

              Oh come on now everyone knows what an adblocker is. It’s right in the goddamn name: ad blocker, the thing that blocks ads.

              Even if they don’t know how to disable it they can just google it. And if they lack the skill to do that too, they couldn’t have succeeded installing Firefox in the first place.

              Stop trying to justify clearly unethical decisions because you used to like the entity who made the decision

              • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
                01·
                4 months ago

                Understanding something doesn’t mean you support it. Sad so many people can’t understand this or how normal people operate.