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https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the use

https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase: > Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse

dleslie 9y ago
Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.
ubernostrum 9y ago
betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.

dleslie 9y ago

Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.

ubernostrum 9y ago

betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.