9 ms·
Mozilla Presses Pause on Facebook Advertising
- jakecopp 9y agoIs this purely a symbolic move? Do you think other people will follow or is this a statement of position?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- JeremyBanks 9y agoI see a lot of Mozilla ads on Facebook, for what it's worth. Enough that I'd assume this is a somewhat significant move for them.
- z3t4 9y agoWhat kinds of ads do Mozilla have ? Ḯ'm a bit surprised that they advertise at all.
- smsm42 9y agoProbably "did you know Mozilla browser exists? Please download it and try it".
- JeremyBanks 9y agoMostly they focus on their privacy initiatives and features. Not just Firefox directly, but other projects to build brand affinity or something. I'm afraid I can't go check what ads I saw, since I just jumped on the bandwagon and deactivated my account.
- z3t4 9y agoBefore you deactivate, set a unique password so it doesn't get hacked. One day I got asked if I had re-joined Facebook supposedly I was making posts about food supplements ...
- JeremyBanks 9y agoPrudent advice. Thankfully, I already had, and it's nicely locked up in 1Password. :)
- tardygrad 9y agoOne of the first things you see on that page (on mobile), even above the headline of the article, is a Facebook share button. Facebook has its claws in deep. De-Facebooking the Web isn't going to be a simple task. Bit of hypocrisy to say 'we're not advertising on Facebook anymore' while leaving those buttons in place. Would be ironic if people shared this article on Facebook.
- lettergram 9y agoI actually have been ironically sharing many of these posts on Facebook, along with the #deletefacebook tag.
- dingo_bat 9y agoI have started posting 1 pic every day on facebook (hadn't posted anything for a year) as soon as I saw the #delete fb propaganda going on.
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoIs there a way to put a "Follow us on Facebook" button without a FB tracker script?
- dingo_bat 9y agoMozilla is funded by Google, who desperately wants to dethrone fb. So it's not surprising.
- roryisok 9y agoIs that still true? I thought Google stopped funding Mozilla recently. Edit: Just checked, they had a deal with Google until 2014 when they signed with yahoo instead. As of 2017 they switched back to Google as the fault search engine but there's no info on Wikipedia at least about whether or not they get money this time around
- dingo_bat 9y agoOf course they get money. Otherwise why would they set google as default.
- 1ris 9y agoBecause its the only sensible search engine and setting it was default improves the user experience of firefox.
- isomorphic 9y agoAbsolutely. You can see Mozilla attribution in the Google URLs. (Unless you've modified your search engines--which Mozilla has made harder to modify.)
- dahdum 9y agoDidn’t Mozilla side load a Mr Robots extension ad and silently install Cliqz adware onto German users? IIRC the Cliqz extension sends all your browsing history to them.
- kuschku 9y agoYes, they did, and it caused Mozilla to lose almost a quarter of their German marketshare in a few months. The CliqZ debacle was insanity, considering that Burda, the parent company of CliqZ, is mostly known for its ad and tracking networks, and its clickbait tabloids.
- Dylan16807 9y agoThe Mr. Robot extension wasn't an ad (it did nothing from being installed). With Cliqz they announced it would be bundled with the installer some of the time as a pilot program. I don't know how silent it was, and I can't find a good followup about what actually ended up happening in/after that pilot program.
- gfodor 9y agoThe Mr Robots ARG related marketing content that was deployed through SHIELD had a post-mortem released in January, as promised, following the apology issued in December shortly after it happened. https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/retrospective-looking-glass/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/retrospective-looking-glass... (disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
- rdiddly 9y agoWith advertisers pulling out, this is officially turning into a shitstorm. But it's surprisingly frustrating watching everyone slowly catch on to what I had already figured out 8 years ago about the nature of Facebook. Even more so when I think about all the people who'll just go right back when the outrage dies down.
- isomorphic 9y agoIt's not a shitstorm until Facebook announces subsequent quarterlies with a material decrease in revenue. Then it will be a shitstorm. Until then any stock movement is just Wall Street.
- adventured 9y agoIt's really not turning into a shitstorm. People are comforting themselves by telling themselves that. Here's what is going to happen. - Facebook's finances won't be meaningfully impacted at all. Advertisers are not going to abandon FB in any consequential numbers. They'll spit off ~$21 billion in net income in 2018 and end the year with around $50 billion in cash. One of the richest corporations in world history, at the age of 15. Comparable to the income production of Microsoft, a juggernaut that is 40 years old. - Zuckerberg and Facebook will go to Washington, so to speak. They'll bow down as the powers want them to, pledge changes, blah blah blah. We're so very sorry we helped Donald Trump to get elected, we promise it won't happen again. - Some new monster US Government bureaucracy will be crafted. It'll simultaneously be claimed to protect privacy while assisting the government in further abusing it. The Digital Protection Agency. It will also make compliance increasingly costly and difficult, benefiting the existing tech giants, entrenching their positions against start-up competition. This will increase stagnation. [1] - A very tiny, entirely meaningless, portion of Facebook users will quit. It will be 1% or less. Most people don't care. Even the ones that do, will overwhelmingly continue using the platform to broadcast their opinions or photos or just to communicate with friends & family generally. - Political speech and political advertising will be further restricted online. The big tech platforms will become regulated stand-in government & political party censorship systems, as with traditional broadcast media of past generations. This is aggressively being put into place now, across every major social network. They're all going to comply willingly. - Political power, and the power of these tech giants, will be more entrenched than ever before. It will become even harder to unseat those already in power. The duopoly politcal party system in the US, will ensure its survival at the top of the food chain and will regulate the platforms to their benefit, as was the case with traditional media. Again, this is taking place right now. Nothing will prevent it. As the tech giants increasingly pledge fealty - while on their knees begging forgiveness - to the existing political system in DC - the two parties - their survival will be guaranteed and protected through regulation and favors. This is tradition at this point, going back nearly a century. The powers that be in Washington don't care who wins in tech, or how much money the winners make, they care about obedience to their agenda of maintaing control & power. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/paul-ford-facebook-is-why-we-need-a-digital-protection-agency https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/paul-ford...
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoI always wondered why Facebook did not buy Opera.
- Method-X 9y agoAnd thank god they didn't.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoYes.
- bwang29 9y agoWould it be possible to have "parental ratings" on ads for adults? The problem with advertising is once you've seen it, there is few methods to unsee it (you could probably argue some hypnotherapy can do). By forcing someone to see an ad without a prior approval of the viewer, it's also forcing someone to passively memorize some sort of information. And in some maybe not-too-distance-altered-carbon future, violate their right to forget the ad (as there is no such method you can pay for forget seeing an ad). What if instead of having a button on an ad to say "Do not show me ad like this", instead having all ads start with a button/muted dialog such as "We like to show an ad of this sort, and it will likely create light memorization, strong persuasion with heavy text but little colorful graphics". I'm really thinking the events going on right now can create some new opportunity to reimagine how the relationship between ads and viewers could work out.
- jakecopp 9y agoIf this did happen Facebook would quickly figure out exactly what ads you like/make an impression on you, which is just more ammunition for adtech.
- jakecopp 9y agoI find the danger with ad blockers is they hide the true extent of the tracking from me, because I never see the results. I've now sandboxed Facebook (and others) in container tabs in Firefox so no cookies go in or out, along with uBlock Origin to whitelist JS per site.
- switch007 9y ago> I find the danger with ad blockers is they hide the true extent of the tracking from me, because I never see the results. Seeing some relevant ads on the web is just scratching the surface isn't it? Isn't the true extent – and far more worrying – what we can't immediately see, or know it's because of tracking? http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-paradigm-be-the-friction-our-response-to-the-new-lords-of-the-ring-12241996.html http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-parad... I only discovered her writing last night, but Shoshana Zuboff appears to think it is mass surveillance, that big data has bought in new classes of overloads, technology is an attack on democracy and some uses of it break the fundamentals of trust and contracts etc.
- akkat 9y agoCan you elaborate how you sandboxed tabs in Firefox? I use incognito when using Google or sites that use Facebook commenting on order to lower the tracking ability, but sandboxing sounds better.
- spacehunt 9y agoContainer tabs: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
- jakecopp 9y agoI make one "Container" per account, and then visit the page in question and tick "Always open in $CONTAINER_NAME. Then when you sign into Facebook, any other domain won't get the cookie. Then get Cookie AutoDelete, tick "Enable Support for Firefox's Container Tabs", and whitelist the cookies you need to sign into those sites. Combined with uBlock Origin it's the best setup I've found so far, though Firefox Quantum destroys my MacBook's battery. I used to have Safari and Safari Technology Preview to keep good battery life, with only one browser signed into Google, FB and others but I still noticed some searches into the non-signed in browser leaking to FB - I have a feeling the two browsers share some state. If anybody knows an improvement for Firefox's battery usage on macOS I'd love to hear!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jey 9y agoBut wasn't it obvious to everyone who glanced at the Facebook API back in 2014 that it was trivial to gather tons of information, and all they asked you to do was to clickwrap promise that you'll be a good boy/girl?
- milankovic 9y agoYes, exactly. Really shocked, shocked to learn that there was some web scraping going on..
- smsm42 9y agoIn light of articles like https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f... the quote is even more appropriate.
- goombastic 9y agoNot sure how many of you run pihole and check the logs. The number of sites tracking people is crazy. To top it, devices and android phones in particular, seem to be doing it a little too much as well. I tried using mi phones for a while and decided to stop after looking at my logs.
- abtom 9y agoThis is why I always buy phones that allow me to flash my own ROM. That way you only have Google (and whatever apps you decide to give access to) tracking you and not your OEM.
- pimmen 9y agoInitiatives like this is what really makes the big tech giants change. Google and Facebook sees you as the product, when you switch services it's not really the end of the world. Keeping you on their platform is a cost. To cover this cost and profit off of you, they need advertising dollars. Those entities are the real customers and Facebook and Google must keep them on. And this relationship is one of the reasons I think Google and Facebook are overvalued because Wall Street doesn't see the parallel with other industries and how their brand has suffered from lack oversight. When H&M was found to be using child labor in Pakistan we didn't allow them to get away with excuses about "oh, we produce so much clothes, we can't just switch" they had to promptly tell us what their exit strategy was from that textile provider. Imagine Wells Fargo is found to have bought adds from Google that was featured on an site for Holocaust denial or ISIS recruitment, really bad stuff. Imagine the reporter asking if Wells Fargo supports ISIS and they would answer "of course not, we have no idea where Google will feature our ads, we only know what target demographic we bought" to which the reporter could reply "so, will you make Google guarantee you won't be funding Islamic extremism? Or will you be moving off of Google soon and start buying ads from local newspapers where you know for a fact they won't publish ISIS recruitment or Holocaust denial pieces?". When it starts sinking in for the Fortune 500s what they're really buying Google and Facebook will find that quality control is a lot more important and expensive than they previously thought.