wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.'
> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.
No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.
> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone
My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.
Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.
I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.
Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.
Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.
Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.
Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.
I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.
> They can find other business models other than advertisement.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
> No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us.
The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.
mozilla used to have this smart guy, brendan something, as their cto. but he was chased out of mozilla and created a new browser called brave. it actually does what this current cto claims to be trying to do
Yeah, being against advertising isn't fundamentally about privacy. I mean, I care about privacy too, but even an ad that collects no data about me is bad. I simply do not want products shoved in my face. If I need something from your company I'll come to you.
Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.
Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.
Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).
My guess is that this[0] means we might see some manifest v3 type stuff happen in the future as ad blocking becomes a conflict of interest for Mozilla.
Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private:
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance
And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.
> primary reason many of us are at
Mozilla.
If that is the case, and this is the
best fight you can muster give up,
go home and hand over the fight to
better people. A mission to create
the weapons people need to fight
online surveillance requires guile,
a strong will, a strong stomach, a
clear understanding of who the enemy
is and the ability to stick to some
basic principles,
> Digital advertising is not going away
What kind of a defeatist attitude is
that? People want it to go
away. That's why they use Firefox.
Mozilla are supposed to be defending
that corner. What a lame cop out!
> but the surveillance parts could
actually go away if we get it
right.
We had a working system for digital
advertisement in the 1990s. Go back
to that and figure where you got
lost.
The linked post is a sad masterpiece
of appeasement, cowardice and
snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is
abandoning it's mission and selling
out. The CEO should step down.
And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit:
"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."
No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.
What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.
Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.
The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.
Yup making this change will result in a slower move away from the current worse situation, which is less private then the proposed Mozilla future, is my reading.
The fact that the disgusting parasitic entity that is Meta is a part of this makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that the Mozilla CTO is supportive of Meta being a part of it? Just unspeakable.
> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
I think if you a refresh it does flush all your add-ons, no? Unless you have sync turned on you’ll have fun reinstalling them again and setting them up to your liking, and that is pain for someone like me who has 11 of them. Even with sync you still lose settings if they aren’t “sync aware”
Have used it as my secondary browser (~everything that doesn't need login: documentation, news, etc) for a couple of years now and it is great.
Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:
- stays up to date with development of FF
- turns off all the stupid ideas
- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things
I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.
So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.
If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.)
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
I personally don't care if 90% of websites which rely on advertising disappear or replace their monetization strategy with gated, paid access. I even think this is a good thing.
As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.
We had safe and private advertising back in the 90s. Local computer store in Cityville would pay money to local Cityville forum, and when you'd open the "computers" subforum, the Computer store banner would be at the top.
Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.
They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.
> But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet.
1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.
2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.
3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.
The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.
Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are.
I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
> It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA.
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly!
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook).
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here.
There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.
Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?
The site covers all bases. The content of the script is shown on the landing page - and you have to visit it to see the instructions to run it. The comment also explains how to do it through through the configuration UI.
That means you have 3 choices:
* Use curl to run the script as directed
* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run
* follow the instructions to update through the UI.
> Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.
What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future.
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.
Odd, it was 'true' for me, and I have all the privacy stuff in there set to the most private of settings. There was one section in there with an option labeled:
> Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.
I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Just set mitigations=off if you want this, it's a meta-parameter that enables all the others. I used to run it on old hardware (Haswell) because of significant impact of all those mitigations on IO performance. It's not a problem anymore on my newer Zen 4.
Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.
> 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.
The above docs also tell you how to turn it off with mouse clicks in regular settings (I don't understand why OP proposes to set it using the command line, perhaps so they can run it as a cronjob in case it gets reset? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
I'm fine with Firefox finding ways to compete with Chrome. For me, its survival depends upon it. And with its survival, we get all sort of forks (tor browser, librewolf, and so on) for niche users like HN readers commenting here and myself (Yes, privacy is niche. I would like a different reality, but that's how it is.)
Yes, beta version for sure(just go to about:config), possibly it works on the normal version with the following method (which allows you to insert a user.js)
Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google
>Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things.
I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.
From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.
Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.
There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.
You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.
They should concentrate on developing the browser and get out of political activism entirely. Use the rather large amount of money they already have as an investment fund to finance a slimmed-down operation while also soliciting donations from users and some select companies. Ditch the large administrative staff they gained during the Baker years, swap some of them out for developers. They should not try to be a PAC, there's enough of those already.
All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.
You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.
I'd donate to Mozilla if the money was actually going towards browser development, and not whatever idiotic bullshit the corp side of it decides to buy (like Pocket, for example) next.
Giving arbitrary actors control to target you and load whatever they want in your browser window is an uneeded liability. I have seen for myself people getting scammed by ads. No one was held accountable.
mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?
curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????
This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow.
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).
The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Pale Moon" is their toxic developers. But let's ignore that... Is it safe to use Pale Moon as your main browser? How many security patches is it missing from upstream Firefox? Do they have any security team?
I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
mrinfinitiesx|1 year ago
> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.
No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.
I turned it off in about:config
lolinder|1 year ago
My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.
Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.
I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.
raxxorraxor|1 year ago
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.
commodoreboxer|1 year ago
Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.
Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.
spondylosaurus|1 year ago
PhasmaFelis|1 year ago
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
skydhash|1 year ago
The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.
anewguy9000|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
timeon|1 year ago
As far as i know I still pay for internet. Only free internet is with public wifi.
kerkeslager|1 year ago
Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.
Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.
kazinator|1 year ago
The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.
Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.
Buttons840|1 year ago
replete|1 year ago
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
Vinnl|1 year ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
nonrandomstring|1 year ago
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance
And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.
> primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.
If that is the case, and this is the best fight you can muster give up, go home and hand over the fight to better people. A mission to create the weapons people need to fight online surveillance requires guile, a strong will, a strong stomach, a clear understanding of who the enemy is and the ability to stick to some basic principles,
> Digital advertising is not going away
What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? People want it to go away. That's why they use Firefox. Mozilla are supposed to be defending that corner. What a lame cop out!
> but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.
We had a working system for digital advertisement in the 1990s. Go back to that and figure where you got lost.
The linked post is a sad masterpiece of appeasement, cowardice and snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is abandoning it's mission and selling out. The CEO should step down.
red_trumpet|1 year ago
ghostly_s|1 year ago
"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."
No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.
What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.
Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.
The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.
pacifika|1 year ago
sensanaty|1 year ago
3np|1 year ago
red_admiral|1 year ago
> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
EasyMark|1 year ago
bravetraveler|1 year ago
It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.
Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.
Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions
phendrenad2|1 year ago
mccr8|1 year ago
93po|1 year ago
Yodel0914|1 year ago
0: https://librewolf.net/
eitland|1 year ago
Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:
- stays up to date with development of FF
- turns off all the stupid ideas
- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things
I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.
So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.
If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
podiki|1 year ago
cjpearson|1 year ago
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
lpcvoid|1 year ago
As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.
ajsnigrutin|1 year ago
Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.
They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.
kerkeslager|1 year ago
1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.
2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.
3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.
The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.
perchlorate|1 year ago
I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
autoexec|1 year ago
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
SCdF|1 year ago
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
trustno2|1 year ago
GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported
https://webkit.org/downloads/
https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
freediver|1 year ago
https://kagi.com/orion
grishka|1 year ago
https://ladybird.org
jqpabc123|1 year ago
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
brezelgoring|1 year ago
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
kmeisthax|1 year ago
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
zczc|1 year ago
Hard_Space|1 year ago
There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.
Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
pointlessone|1 year ago
spinningslate|1 year ago
That means you have 3 choices:
* Use curl to run the script as directed
* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run
* follow the instructions to update through the UI.
prmoustache|1 year ago
olejorgenb|1 year ago
stuartd|1 year ago
I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.
Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
I’ll still block them, though.
[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
account42|1 year ago
This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
Terr_|1 year ago
red_admiral|1 year ago
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
kuon|1 year ago
I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
OutOfHere|1 year ago
kelnos|1 year ago
> Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.
I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
remram|1 year ago
sn0wleppard|1 year ago
yu3zhou4|1 year ago
pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?
perchlorate|1 year ago
Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.
kreyenborgi|1 year ago
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
remram|1 year ago
DavideNL|1 year ago
I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
leotravis10|1 year ago
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
adr1an|1 year ago
jmakov|1 year ago
user070223|1 year ago
Instructions: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
Other option is to use another gecko based browser check this https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
remram|1 year ago
_rdvw|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
kelnos|1 year ago
Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago
shiroiushi|1 year ago
I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.
From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.
Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.
There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.
You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.
the_third_wave|1 year ago
account42|1 year ago
From donations and government grants. You know, like proper non-profits that aren't trying to LARP as a SV unicorn.
Johanx64|1 year ago
All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.
You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.
Extremely scummy organisation.
sensanaty|1 year ago
ikekkdcjkfke|1 year ago
clcaev|1 year ago
modzu|1 year ago
oriettaxx|1 year ago
account42|1 year ago
clemailacct1|1 year ago
robaxisal|1 year ago
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
sigh
kelnos|1 year ago
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
roca|1 year ago
(Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
bjord|1 year ago
So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?
Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...
horsawlarway|1 year ago
They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
baliex|1 year ago
LordShredda|1 year ago
nonrandomstring|1 year ago
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
willywanker|1 year ago
luuurker|1 year ago
I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
efilife|1 year ago
This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private.
I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work
dinozarw|1 year ago
m878m78|1 year ago
[deleted]