No argument from me there. I didn’t mean to come across this argumentative, I just wanted to point it out here because of the context of this post (someone looking to move away from Firefox). And because, to me, ad telemetry still is a black box.
Mozilla is adopting a ton of the things that were wrong with Brave. Recently, Brave criticized Mozilla’s PPA data collection for being too centralized, which implies to me that otherwise, there’s a lot of overlap between the two allegedly “private” systems. I don’t trust Brave telemetry, but it seems not even they can come up with many ways to differentiate themselves from Mozilla.
If they’re different somehow, I would love to know how.
In a way other than accrued trust or distrust, that is. At this point, I don’t think Mozilla is owed any inherent trust.
How worried should people be if they are on the latest version of Fennec, which was last updated for 129.0.2 a couple months ago? (For anyone who isn’t keeping track: that’s not ESR (128 is), and it’s two major versions behind Firefox Release).
I wasn’t going to make a generic comment about how cryptocurrency is only worth money to people if they can convince other people to also purchase the cryptocurrency…
… But then I looked at your post history, and it’s like a week of pivoting conversations to be about Monero.
Edit: oh god it was worse than I thought
Basically. Insultingly, it was built alongside, and in some collaborative measure with, Google. (A bunch of companies bigger than Mozilla, and a bunch of ad networks, are all teaming up for the PATCG).
You:
What is transmitted is not user activity.
Mozilla:
When a user interacts with an ad or advertiser, a record of that interaction…
User interactions are not user activities to you?
You said
All user activity remains local in the browser
The pertinent information is that you were incorrect. That should be a big enough red flag for you to reevaluate how safe and secure you think PPA is.
When a user interacts with an ad or advertiser, a record of that interaction is… sent to two independently operated services.
How about Reddit or DeviantArt? I’ve noticed issues with each of those
…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3
I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.
If a company is unethical, they will ignore the Mozilla standard. If a company is ethical, they don’t need the Mozilla standard, as they can adopt their own tracking-free methods of serving ads.
I have been told repeatedly by Firefox advertisement advocates that PPA only affects people that don’t use ad blockers, so it allegedly only affects people that are already blasted by tracking networks to the fullest extent possible, while people who use ad blockers wouldn’t see the supposedly less invasive ads anyway. So it’s either 100% tracking to 110% tracking, or 0% tracking to 0% tracking. Seems like a lose-lose scenario for both sides of the equation.
disingeneous to call it adding ads
Who called it adding
With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.
Well, I don’t foresee any downsides. Hopefully they can continue making an incredible browser and operating system respectively.
You can use your own self-hosted servers with this too.
If you want.
Self-hosting can create its own additional privacy and security issues… unless you totally trust not only the place where you put the server, but also yourself to be a security expert
Brave can keep the old APIs but they’ll still be affected, because developers for Chromium-compatible browsers still have to decide whether they want to create or support apps that will only work in a subset of browsers, and figure out how to distribute them outside the Chromium store.
TIL the things to build a browser take up less space than a package manager… But I don’t do Linux any more hardcore than Ubuntu either
Corrupt politicians can simply ignore the law. If they didn’t ignore it, they wouldn’t be very corrupt.
Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:
uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.
The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.
I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.