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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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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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
Noice
I guess librewolf is the future
Librewolf still makes lots of connections to Mozilla. While Basilisk annihilates them fully
No telemetry though which is the big one
Not exactly telemetry, but looking at Mozilla privacy policy makes you assume their every domain must be blocked
I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s personally identifiable at all, just aggregate.
IMO, that’s splitting a hair.
For a browser that supposedly respects user privacy, the fact that this is opt-out rather than opt-in really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m going to reconsider my monthly recurring donation to Mozilla, especially if they keep this up.
I hate to break it to you but you aren’t a significant source of income for Mozilla. You are the product not the customer.
I never said I was, just that I wanted to support the browser that respects my privacy, and this move is making me reconsider it.
As long as it’s open source someone will be able to find a way to turn it off, either by an addon or by patching and compiling the source code.
Adjust isn’t google adservices. The difference is staggering, actually, and way more than a hair’s split on identifying information not being included.
I can’t help but see it as the foot in the door.
I understand that Mozilla needs money, but I can’t make everyone who uses Firefox commit to donating money to keep them from having to do things like this to stay afloat. But them going down this path makes me not want to donate at all.
Literally every browser has this option, and it gives users a choice. If you use an ad blocker, it has this option as well and has had it for several years now.
Not this option, but generally I agree. Currently I don’t think this is bad, and in the longer term we will see if this leaks any identifyable data.
This is the first browset to implement something like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about and you don’t either apparently.
Safari refers to it as “Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement”, and Chrome includes an option as part of its “Privacy Sandbox.” Please have the decency to do a basic google search before being an asshole :)
Chrome’s privacy sandbox is a very different protocol from Mozilla’s PPA protocol. I haven’t read about Safari’s variant so I don’t know if that’s a copy/paste of Chrome’s or it’s own protocol
The big difference between Privacy Sandbox (previously Topics API and before that FLoC) and PPA is that Google’s “solution” still tracks the user while Mozilla’s just tracks the ads and gives aggregate data to the advertiser
There are people that use Firefox who also get served ads?
They haven’t added ad tracking. That’s a fake news. You should read up on how it actually works.
I’ve read up on how it works and it says it’s tracking how well or badly ads perform when shown to me. That’s tracking ads, otherwise called ad tracking.
What now?
It’s not tracking you. It’s not the same.
It’s tracking how well ads perform without tracking individual users. Tracking ads isn’t the problem. Tracking users is the problem. Before this the only way to track ad performance was by tracking users. This is a way to track ad performance without tracking users.
I still don’t want advertisers to know if their ads were effective on me
Tracking ads is also a problem, just a different one. The whole point of ads is to manipulate your behavior. There’s plenty of reason to not want to make that more effective