mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
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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*
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Librewolf
What’s the behavior before this option was added? Would websites track you or not?
They definitely didn’t just stop tracking you because this option exists.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/p1m2bc/who_are_adjust_the_mobile_marketing_vendor_used/
Whatever it is, it’s been around for at least 3 years.
And they wonder why their market share is decreasing.
The only major browser that actually seems to care about their users is Vivaldi, sadly.
Vivaldi is not private, or open source. It is also a fork of Chromium. If we are going to name forks, then Librewolf or GNU Icecat are better browsers by a mile.
LibreWolf and Icecat still make lots of unsolicited connections to Mozilla servers. The only maintained project that seems to solve it is Basilisk. It even uses its own add-on store.
Name anything Vivaldi specifically (not Chromium-wide) has done to screw over their users. I can’t name a single thing, while I can name many Anti-User things Firefox has done.
Unfortunately, open-source becomes nearly meaningless when the cost to produce a fork becomes so prohibitive and the open-source project starts acting like a for-profit company.
Here is some reading for you (if you want):
https://privacytests.org/vivaldi.html
https://avoidthehack.com/review-vivaldi-browser
I can say the same thing about Librewolf, as they haven’t done anything to screw over their users either.
Vivaldi just does not have strong ad-blocking, fingerprinting protections, or privacy a preserving measures in general. Here is a comparison between some browsers: https://privacytests.org/
Oh shit. Now that I have checked, it was turned on by default on mine too.
What’s wrong with you mozilla ?? Firefox was supposed to be the alternative
They have gone corrupt, they’re full-on techbros now
It has not been the alternative for a while now IMO. I have been using LibreWolf.
“It’s okay, we can enshitify a little.” - the board at Mozilla probably.
“You dimwitted plebs are too stupid to meaningfully opt-in, so we made it opt-out.”
Just a taste. We can stop at any time.
just the tip. We’ll just soak the ad tracking for a bit.
It’s better to apologize than to ask permission, right babe? Right!?
Community: Boo!
Community: well, they have to (and whatever).
I sense some mental dissonance.
The community is VERY MUCH against the decline of Mozilla
Lol ladybird browser Dev is a homophobe? Could you send some evidence, I want to see this joke. Also, yeah, that’s really funny that people are ready to attack anybody with wrong political opinion, but when anybody is attacking them with ads/tracking/MITM they’ll find a thousand excuses for that fucked up behavior. Evils should be treated equally – mitigated and hated. There is no excuse for a single ad/tracker a person haven’t asked for. Same as there is no excuse to hate gays
No i can’t. All i know is that there was some uproar about this a week ago.
Cognitive dissonance? Not supporting bigotry is wholly unrelated to this issue. Also who calls gay people homosexuals? Just say gays like a normal person ffs
I would call it a vocal minority
if by “community” you mean the majority of users… I think you are backwards in both of those. Most don’t care about what Andreas did, and most firefox users are outraged at this.
Here’s the information about it. It’s anonymous and It can be turned off https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
It needs to be opt-in to be acceptable. Opt-out is not acceptable.
There is no “anonymous” data. All telemetry should ALWAYS be opt-in, not opt-out. Otherwise all the words about privacy browser are garbage lies. And they are. Mozilla always lies to its users.
As someone who works on data anonymization, I never trust anonymization.
That somehow makes it better?
Edit typo
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?
Cookies are a non-issue. They store data only locally and can be edited and removed at will. With third party isolation on by default there’s really no reason to worry about them much anymore. And if you do just install cookie auto-delete to clean things up.
This variant is definitely worse because the data is no longer just local.
Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.
Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.
Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.
The issue is that I already knew about cookies. I don’t want my browser to phone home (or anywhere else) without my consent.
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
Also, it might be annonymized for this dataset, by adding more ‘annonymized’ datasets stuff can be correlated
The problem is supporting ad networks.
Edit: /s because apparently it wasn’t obvious. Anonymous is obviously better.
Mozilla has to generate enough revenue to continue developing their products somehow. It would be nice if donations were enough to cover those development costs but that simply isn’t the case. Because of this the ad networks are a necessary “evil”.
Supporting ad networks is not a ‘necessary’ evil. There are many not-for-profit organisations that do not use ads for revenue raising.
What would you suggest then? They’ve been unable to sustain themselves via donations alone.
When writing my previous post I had started writing a list of suggested strategies; but I changed my mind about posting that. I’m not a member of Mozilla. I don’t know what particular challenges they face, and my expertise are not in not-for-profit fundraising. So although I do have ideas, I don’t really want to get into a trap of trying to defend my half-arse ideas against people picking them apart. It’s beside the point. The point is just that it is achievable, as evidenced by other organisations achieving it.
I will say though that they could at least just mention on the Firefox ‘successful update’ page that Firefox is supported by donations, and give a link. A lot of people really like Firefox; and I think that if Firefox asked for donations, they would get more donations.
Fire their ceo that they’re paying 6 million a year
The setting from the original post is for sites in general, it’s not specifically about Mozilla sites. I’m not sure how having this option relates to their revenue, unless Google put it in their search contract with them?
Edit: Wait, I see people mentioning Mozilla acquired an ad company?
Yes. Yes, they did.
Jesus.
deleted by creator
That’s part 2
WTF… i thought this was just click bait but went to check on my phone as i am not at my PC right now
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
This browser still makes lots of unsolicited connections to Firefox on each launch. Regardless of the settings you’ll choose. There are no single good browser on Android.
I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
Does your browser make connections on launch when you haven’t even opened anything? That should not happen.
These are old options. I checked these off long ago.
I know, that’s awful. I also turn it off. But that’s actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
Mine was off, just checked.
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
Use Mull
It was on for me too, wtf…
I’m using Mull.
Here’s the info about it: https://mzl.la/3AcmG8q
I’m on 128 on my phone. I just checked and both of those are disabled for me.
Idk what 128 is on a phone, but my galaxy s21 had everything still off. Guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it
build number (version) of Firefox, which is the software in question.
“Galaxy S21” is the model name for a physical Samsung phone, which isn’t relevant to the topic.
Oh, heard that. I’m on 128 on my phone too and they were all disabled
I’m on 128 on my phone and it was on for me, I definitely didn’t turn those on myself. wtf.
Same
double same
Triple same.
weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it
For everyone trying to find the setting— On my android phone, there’s a setting called “data collection”. Mine were already all off, so idk who it affects