16 ms·

Privacy preserving attribution for advertising

234 points by Santosh83 5y ago

richardfey 5y ago
Is this the Mozilla equivalent of Google 's Topics[1] (previously FLoC)? [1] https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics
- ekr____ 5y ago
  No. Topics is oriented at targeting ads to people with specific interests. This technology is designed to measure "conversion", e.g., when people click on an ad and then buy the corresponding product in a privacy-preserving way.
  - richardfey 5y ago
    Alright, thanks!
- cyral 5y ago
  FLoC is for targeting, this is for attribution.
olliej 5y ago
How does this compare to WebKits privacy preserving attribution?
- nottorp 5y ago
  Safari is less resource hungry on Macs :) Or was before the last "redesign". I guess ungoogled chromium might be a solution. Or: what's a decent ad blocking solution for modern Safari?
- ekr____ 5y ago
  They have similar objectives but achieve them differently. Roughly, Private Click Measurement uses very low entropy identifiers to achieve rough of clicks and conversions. IPA uses multiparty computation instead. Probably the most salient differences are: PCM leaks some information about user behavior, but it has a high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X% chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don't collude). PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a laptop). IPA potentially does. Ben Savage's slides cover this in more detail: https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telecon/IPA%20design%20considerations%20-%20PAT-CG%20preso.pdf https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telec...
  - olliej 5y ago
    The slides imply cross device/browser identification? I can't see how that happens without some kind of shared account mechanism. The slides imply that losing cross device attribution is a regression. It absolutely is not, as such ability does not currently exist. So this While I recognize the advertisers may want attribution, but it still seems like FB+Google both still want to know as much about the user as possible, and both definitely have the resources to achieve the de-anonymising attacks (especially given chrome's ever present attempts to get people to tie their entire browsing session to their google identity).
    - ekr____ 5y ago
      You're right that this assumes an account. The way that cross device/browser identification works in IPA is that if you are logged into example.com (though realistically, often Facebook) then it can set a "match key" which is the same on device and browser. You can't read the match key, only write it. This match key is used to link up activities on both. The point of the crypto is to rerandomize the match key that appears in the reports so that it is possible two see that two actions are from the same device but not link that back up to the original match key. Note that in this proposal, the assumption is that anyone would be able to use anyone else's match key (addressed by origin) so that it's not a big advantage to be the site with the account. Re whether this is a regression or not: I am not an expert on how the current attribution mechanism works but I believe that if people are logged into (for instance) Facebook then Facebook can use that to correlate clicks on device A with purchases on device B.
      - olliej 5y ago
        Except in browser's like Brave and Safari that actively work to break that kind of tracking - this feature essentially appears to mandate it.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Is this a joke?
- v3ss0n 5y ago
  Thats it , i am done , i had installed mozilla because of sympathy , now its time to uninstall.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    i've been bouncing between firefox and vivaldi lately, I think i've made up my mind
    - blondin 5y ago
      vivaldi had me with their vertical tabs. they were the first to do it natively and properly. but my excitement didn't last. i was having a hard time with their bazillion settings. i wanted something that works well out of the box. i know some people like all these possible options but it was not for me. nowadays, i use edge for vertical tabs. edge is chrome with vertical tabs in my world. but it would be cool if the minimized sidebar didn't expand on hover. it's a user experience nightmare. (in case any engineer on the edge project is reading)
      - rubyist5eva 5y ago
        i agree the settings were a bit overwhelming at first - but I eventually settled on something rather minimalistic and haven't changed anything since YMMV of course, and I just refuse to use Edge out of principle.
danShumway 5y ago
Oh. Bigger story here appears to be that the proposal is publicly editable and has already been vandalized. I'm not going to link to it, but I will say that I'm not thrilled that Mozilla is handling proposals using these formats/hosting choices. So much of this feels weird to me. I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard. I can't read up on the IPA standard because the link is currently being vandalized, so I can't really comment on that, but this is dangerous ground to tread and also I vaguely feel like as a user I might want to not have ads attributed across devices. Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the best browser to use for privacy right now. But crud this announcement is weird and vaguely tone-deaf and doesn't make me feel good, and I think at the very least it should have been worded less as a celebration, or at least should have spent more time going into why I shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the whole thing. It's potentially a longer conversation, but the article also doesn't really make a strong case for why I should be rooting for a privacy-respecting system for advertisers in the first place.
- strulovich 5y ago
  > I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard. I don’t think that’s why you want FB/Meta here. But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this actually becomes a solution. If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just wasting time. Assuming the competition is standard built by Google within itself, this makes sense. (Meta employee, don’t work on ads, opinions my own)
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    > If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just waiting time. Which is why regulation is needed. Otherwise, any solution needs to be more attractive to the advertisers than the people they stalk (i.e. everybody else).
saberworks 5y ago
Ugh, it's like they're trying to drive users away.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yet another useless thing for uBlock Origin to get rid of. Why are browsers going out of their way to help advertisers in the first place?
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  Why? Money. Mozilla gets hundreds of millions of $ from Google every year? Any wonder why Mozilla was the last one to jump on the privacy bandwagon? And now they are holding hands with another big privacy invader.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
akomtu 5y ago
Targeted advertising cannot simultaneously know everything about a user_id and respect privacy of that user_id. Every bit of privacy is an extra user_id's attribute that could be used for more accurate advertising.
- mqus 5y ago
  In their defense, this is not really about targeting (afaict) but rather understanding how many people saw/clicked on that ad.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  This isn't really about targeting specific users, rather seeing overall aggregated metrics.
gigel82 5y ago
"Privacy Preserving" and Meta do not belong in the same sentence. I guess they want some financial contributions from Meta too since Google's don't cover the C-tier compensation bump.
Macha 5y ago
If Mozilla's browser supports a way for advertisers to track me, be it for attribution, fraud prevention, targeting or any other person, then what is the point in using it over ungoogled-chromium? Mozilla's reputation in my view has sure taken a beating these last few years, and without the details of the proposal (thanks to their own fuckup), it's hard not to assume the worst.
- errantmind 5y ago
  If there is no way to disable this 'feature', I will stop using Firefox entirely.
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    And, as with DNT, by disabling it you'll just add another feature for identifying you.
    - Macha 5y ago
      1 bit seems pretty preferable to something which people will pretty quickly find a way to turn into a user ID
      - staticassertion 5y ago
        Maybe - it depends on how much that bit is weighted.
    - rascul 5y ago
      I thought it was the other way around. As it was generally disabled by default, enabling it gave another data point for fingerprinting. But maybe I don't recall correctly.
      - staticassertion 5y ago
        Either way it works. It's just a feature. What the big issue was was that some browsers would enable it by default and some wouldn't, and then you'd have differences across versions, etc. So it became a more powerful feature.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
> Mozilla Partners with [Facebook] on Privacy Okay, until now I gave them some benefit of the doubt. Now Mozilla don’t even try to hide how hypocritical they are.
- paxys 5y ago
  It's not like they have ever hidden it. Pretty much all Mozilla revenue comes from their deals with Google.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    Why do people insist on using this as a point?? It's just guilt by association! Taking Google's money has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. Google paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine. That in no way decreases the privacy for the user and it gets Mozilla the funding they need to develop privacy-enhancing features that do benefit the user.
    - account42 5y ago
      Do you really expect anyone who thinks that making 500k/y instead of millions is not a sacrifice they should be asked to make to do anything to risk their primary source of funding? The money from Google doesn't just buy the default serch engine setting, it is a HUGE incentive for Mozilla to not rock the boat.
    - paxys 5y ago
      Because it is a data point. Sure it isn't a smoking gun pointing to malpractice, but if they are getting $500M/yr from Google, getting into partnerships with Facebook, and continue to make similar moves down the line, you have to question where they can truly be independent enough to be 100% on the consumer's side.
      - themacguffinman 5y ago
        How is that a real data point? Like you said, it just raises questions, it doesn't actually tell you anything. Literally all you're doing is casting vague aspersions.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Why? Mozilla was one of the last companies giving people what they want, which is a web browser without tracking and without bloat. This to me feels like Mozilla's management has abandoned the values that made me choose them over Chrome.
staticassertion 5y ago
I assume this is another cash grab by Mozilla executives as they squeeze the last of the value out of the movement they've tanked.
mfrw 5y ago
"In a shocking turn of events:" -- That's what I would say without even reading!
PascLeRasc 5y ago
The link labeled “IPA overview” is NSFW.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
I would love to have ears on the internal dev channels right about now.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Particularly their DM chats: bossmang might be in the channels and (might need to) have different opinions from the actual devs.
leokennis 5y ago
So now there is only one browser that won’t track you, and it’s Safari.
- ekr____ 5y ago
  Two clarifying points: 1. This is a technical proposal. It has not been incorporated into Firefox; I don't think there are even patches for it at this point. 2. Safari actually already implements a different technology designed to achieve somewhat similar objectives. https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-measurement-pcm/ https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
endisneigh 5y ago
Why even bother with Mozilla at this point? Partnering with the one of the top sources of spyware?
suby 5y ago
Clearly not something being done for the benefit of the users. I don't want any of my information (supposedly anonymized or not) from my browser leaking to advertisers if I can help it, and here my browser provider is taking steps to help facilitate this transfer. I'm really losing trust with Mozilla between moves like this, their in-browser advertising, their continual re-enabling of the user studies telemetry writing over my disabling of it (has happened at least 3x times). You can't monetize your users if they all stop using your browser, Mozilla. We need an alternative.
thekingofh 5y ago
Here’s the problem with aggregation. Even if the if is not attributable to you as an individual the data can still be used as a weapon against you. I’ll give an example: Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly. The indirect aggregated data is just as harmful as if they had targeted you personally. This is where companies try to fool you into thinking you are safe to give them a “non identifiable” advertising id and aggregating your data before selling it. It’s not safe.
- kmlx 5y ago
  > Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly. 1. what’s stopping current governments doing exactly that right now? 2. how much of the market do you think fits that scenario? 3. what’s stopping people in that scenario trying to protect themselves via the usual methods independent of whatever browser they choose?
jacquesm 5y ago
Checks date: No, it's not April 1st. Which would have been a fine day to make this announcement and possibly get away with it. In case you were still on the fence... Mozilla has been trying very hard to eradicate the enormous amount of goodwill they built up over the year. Oh, and it's Facebook, not 'Meta'.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I think it’s Meta now. There was a video where Zuckerberg dressed up like Steve Jobs and described Second Life.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    They're not fooling me. These whitewashes should be ignored, and the name should simply always be prepended by the name under which the entity is generally known. Otherwise the likes of Blackwater get to pretend they are Xe or Academi or some other nice clean corporate identity. Google gets a little bit of leeway because their holding really acts as a holding but in the case of Facebook it is just so you don't immediately associate the name 'Meta' with something vile and ugly. 'Facebook partners with Mozilla' has a different ring to it.
jerry1979 5y ago
Thinking high level, does anyone have a sense of how many folks get paid to work on Firefox? Which projects currently under the Mozilla/Firefox umbrella are worth splitting off and funding?
errantmind 5y ago
> Advertising provides critical support for the Web The premise is flawed, IMO. I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. If it disappeared it would still be fine. Some sites would die out, others would rise. I've said it before, but I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away. I also think this would improve the signal:noise ratio of the web considerably.
- nicce 5y ago
  > I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. That is from the time when not everyone was in the web. Now as basically everyone is here, it is the best place to affect on the minds of people.
- nojs 5y ago
  > I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away That would arguably include HN, which publishes some sponsored threads for YC companies
  - errantmind 5y ago
    I suppose I should have specified "paid advertising". I personally don't see self-promotion as an issue.
- concinds 5y ago
  Thought experiment. Remove all ads from Facebook. Now, the only way corporations can advertise on Facebook is by making Facebook posts on their normal Facebook page; people only see them if they "liked" the company's FB page. What you've done is slightly reduced huge corporations' advertising effectiveness; and absolutely killed every small internet brand. There's people starting cool clothing, food, perfume, watch brands, starting these companies from rock bottom, getting customers through online ads, and becoming millionaires. The vast majority aren't dropshipper idiots; they're legit brands, many of which eventually get acquired by a Fortune 500 corp. This isn't the 90s. Online ads are just essential to getting companies off the ground nowadays. What should people do? Mail-order magazine ads? (still ads.) Cold calling? (isn't that more intrusive than online ads?) There's other aspects too. Kill online ads and you kill a huge chunk of the social mobility that results from entrepreneurship. There's two paths to wealth nowadays: getting a great job, or starting a company. In your ideal world, the only "path" left is the same old "golden path" our parents talked about, of going to a good college, getting 1 or more degrees, and getting a highly paid career at a big corp or SV startup. For various, well-documented reasons, that system ends up excluding tons of people (many ethnic/gender minorities, people with "difficult life paths" who end up dropping out or are unemployable because of gaps in their resume, ex-felons who have paid their debt to society but aren't going to become Apple VPs anytime soon, undocumented immigrants, and many more). Entrepreneurship is an equalizer. The anti-ad kneejerk reaction often comes from an anti-bigcorp philosophy; but it would only strengthen big corps, and harm any small companies trying to compete. You'd significantly weaken one of the best mechanism we have to reduce social/wealth inequality (entrepreneurship). You have people like HVAC specialists and plumbers advertising their services on Facebook. On the contrary, I think it would be extremely sinister is just a few big corps (browser makers) could harm huge chunks of the economy and society by mortally crippling the best way entrepreneurs have of getting customers. I rarely see anti-ad people address any of these concerns. Think of the ramifications; how about every reputable news source being behind a paywall, leaving fake news sites spreading wildly? I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other dangerous ramifications yourself.
BoysenberryPi 5y ago
There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over the coals for this so I don't need to do it. That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.
- account42 5y ago
  > That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.
- notyourday 5y ago
  Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean that it will have to become a product company rather than another bored housewives club masquerading as a software company with some software engineers working for it.
  - kmlx 5y ago
    > Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?
    - lolinder 5y ago
      If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.
DavideNL 5y ago
This feels like a very bad development. Out of curiosity.... what would the best alternative to Firefox be, in regards to privacy? (macOS/Ubuntu/Windows)
- assemblylang 5y ago
  Librewolf[0] is probably the best alternative, drop-in replacement for firefox in terms of privacy. It's essentially (base firefox + privacy patches + privacy policies and configs), and available on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and more. edit: Expect though that some parts of the web won't work with it since WebGL and DRM are disabled. [0] https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- chobytes 5y ago
  have been using librewolf. seems like a good balance of "not mozilla" and usable.
nolok 5y ago
So I understand they're doing this because it's their revenue source and they feel they have to play ball, but this pretty much means they're done. After having lost many battles and flags the one thing they have is that they're not helping them spy on you, it's barely enough to keep them relevant, and they want to dump that too. That's what happens when the people in charge of taking the decisions are not representative of the core users of the product, and thus don't understand what makes the product good or bad for their users. You will not find 1% of current Firefox users by choice who would say they think this is a good decision.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  There is still money to squeeze for C-Suites.
hericium 5y ago
Could've been handled better. Mozilla is Google's bitch.
Jerry2 5y ago
Call me cynical but I'm guessing that Meta just made a large donation to Mozilla and in turn they're using Mozilla to whitewash this proposal. They're just buying Mozilla's reputation (what's left of it) for their purposes. FTA: >We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy. Mozilla's is basically looking for a unicorn. If they really cared about user privacy, they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by default. However, if you look at where their revenue is coming from, you quickly realize why that will never happen.
- akersten 5y ago
  > they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by default. In theory they do - the Tracking Protection thingy is on by default last I checked. I guess dirty money's hard to resist.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    It is not on by default: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Trackin...
    - ekr____ 5y ago
      The naming around the various features is confusing. Briefly: - Tracking Protection basically blocks connections to known trackers entirely so the resources don't even load. - Enhanced Tracking Protection prevents various kinds of cross-site tracking by blocking cookies, etc. (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...). ETP is on by default. TP is not.
      - Jerry2 5y ago
        I found this paper interesting [1] and how they characterize Firefox' behavior out of the box: We investigate the request behavior of each browser (Figure 7). Brave is the most effective at reducing third- party tracking-and-advertising requests; its claim to (1) is supported. The other privacy-focused browsers vary significantly in terms of reducing third-party tracking- and-advertising requests. Firefox Focus and Ghostery differ significantly in how much they reduce third- party tracking-and-advertising requests, but the perfor- mance of both supports their claims, (1) and (2). Fire- fox is least effective at reducing third-party tracking- and-advertising requests. This is unsurprising, as Fire- fox’s enabled-by-default “standard” tracking protection “blocks fewer trackers” [79]. It errs on the side of caution in what it blocks, focusing on restricting tracking cook- ies, social-media trackers, and fingerprinting scripts; it does not block other content (loaded ads, videos) that may perform tracking [78, 105]. Thus, while Firefox claims (2), its blocking of tracking and advertising is limited with its default settings. This is quite disappointing given Mozilla's marketing around privacy. [1] https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-2022-0012.pdf https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-202...
huhtenberg 5y ago
Fuuuuuck. Jesus Fucking Christ, Mozilla. You are just really set on annihilating what's left of your userbase, aren't you? Was it a rider in the contact for using Google as a default search engine? It's just gotta be, because it's hard to think of any other reason for something this anti-user being peddled with such a straight face. Working with THE worst perpetrator that is known for its complete and utter disregard for people's privacy on some PRIVACY PRESERVING bullshit feature. WHAT THE PROVERBIAL FUCK. I am speechless. (A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days).
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days I know, talk about dying a young as a hero or living long enough to become a villain.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  The Mozilla we knew and loved for decades died some time around 2015-ish. Sales and marketing completely took over the organization. They've been slashing engineering projects, and pushing these "key partnerships" nonstop since then. It's very obvious the executive team there couldn't care less about the original mission anymore. Their last remaining meaningful product (Firefox) is essentially in maintenance mode at this point. It's sad to say, but they are now just another tech company interested in nothing but mining your personal data for profit.
- dang 5y ago
  Please make your substantive points without fulminating. Perhaps you don't owe privacy preserving advertising attributing browsers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    I though you'd might have a problem with my comment. This is however an exceptional situation, a piece of news so shocking and unwelcome that the only way I can properly express the level of frustration with it is through the use of expletives and the uppercase. It is absolutely disheartening to see a long-lived and excellent piece of software being so ruthlessly, cynically and systematically destroyed. It really makes my blood boil.
2wrist 5y ago
Ah FFS.
v3ss0n 5y ago
What have you done Mozilla...
sgift 5y ago
I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it's hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies. In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? If the answer is no, that's it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow. This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. So, if a proposal isn't somehow either accepted by Facebook or forced on them it is already dead. I don't think Mozilla has the market power for the second variant, so only the first one is possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap. So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  It's not black and white you can do advertising without "personalisation."
  - hedora 5y ago
    Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. Yes, that would destroy a few incumbents' business models. No, it wouldn't be the end of Google's ad business. According to multiple press releases I've seen, blocking tracking makes ads and marketing about 30% less effective. As a society, that'd mean some combination of increasing ad impressions by 30% and reducing total ad spend (since currently marginal ad campaigns will become unprofitable). That sounds completely acceptable to me, especially if it frees up smart people to work on stuff that actually benefits society in some way.
    - 5y ago
humanwhosits 5y ago
Last thing I want is my browser helping advertisers
comfrey 5y ago
How much did Meta contribute to Moz as a part of the deal?
acqbu 5y ago
major red flag
xaxaxb 5y ago
As a non-profit working on a browser, I don't get what the need is to "partner" with an advertising company. It's like they are saying ads are necessary evil. But who gains from that? Corps obv. Why not partner with another ad company Google? Oh...because they have chrome.
- ekr____ 5y ago
  What "partner" in this case means is "Mozilla engineers collaborated with Meta engineers on developing this proposal". We also routinely partner with Google engineers on technical proposals, see, for instance: QUIC Version Negotiation. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-version-negotiation https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-versio...
  - xaxaxb 5y ago
    Thanks for the response.
jevoten 5y ago
I am unable to view the linked overview [1] of this privacy preserving technology - Google demands I sign in to view the document. Not a good start. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks0yv2j22pA5SrAD9av4s/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks... - omitting the "/edit" suffix does not help
- Sophira 5y ago
  My guess is that this is because it was publicly editable and was being vandalised, according to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306105 Feels like it would have been better for them to make it view-only/editable by specific people rather than hiding the entire thing, but there you go.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    I'm sure they had practical reasons, but the point is that privacy wasn't even considered.
wirrbel 5y ago
Somewhat glad to have moved on to Safari about a year ago (decade-long Firefox user).
jonathankoren 5y ago
Prio is very awesome. It’s homomorphic encryption that allows for aggregate statistics and an auditable, and potentially vetoable, queries. No one can run a query and get valid data back unless all parties agree. When I was at Mozilla I was wanting to use Prio as a privacy layer for federated learning, and audience interest statistics for advertising. Looks like someone finally listened. Congrats team.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
robbedpeter 5y ago
The fox and the weasel partnered on chicken preserving policy for the henhouse.
ddtaylor 5y ago
> We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy. You're probably going to find that any "solution" to the problem involves violating their consent. People don't want their movements tracked and sold to the highest bidder - regardless of how many different ways you slice it up. If you give users a real choice in the matter without obscuring it or providing UI friction the users will choose not to have their data tracked and sold.
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kup0 5y ago
I wish the company/organization behind my favorite and only browser didn't continue to be so tone-deaf. Their reputation in my mind had already been soured, in spite of them having the best browser for my use. Now they make a ludicrous decision to involve Meta in what they think are privacy discussions? I cannot be swayed into seeing Meta's involvement as anything other than a detriment
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zamalek 5y ago
This might be a bit controversial, given the large amount of "F Mozilla" comments already present. The problem is the advertising industry, not advertising. Run a thought experiment quickly, let's say you wanted to start a pro-privacy/anti-malvertising/anti-flashing-bullshit advertising service (the tasteful ads that the likes of daringfireball sometimes features): There's a thousand obvious things you can do: text-only, having the author select "adwords," etc. The problem you'll face no matter what is click-harvesting, how do you know that a real person has clicked the ad? Facebook was the wrong fucking partner here, but maybe attacking or deliberating on the technical aspects of the specification would be a better discussion. If this thing isn't supposed to track us, then we should probably figure out if it actually achieves that, instead of frothing at the mouth. Browsers are going to implement it one way or another.
- gbear605 5y ago
  Ad tracking doesn’t need to be click based. Modern advertisements have existed for two hundred years and tracking has existed for twenty.
- Aachen 5y ago
  This. I didn't quite understand the multiparty computation thing, so I came here for someone to explain it without bias (since of course the authors would claim it's the best thing since sliced bread or, more recently, https). Well, I found bias and no explanations. I'm getting to various comments without any replies so I think I'm almost at the bottom, from here it's only downvoted comments to go...
  - ekr____ 5y ago
    It took me a little time, but here's a hopefully readable description of how it works: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ipa-overview/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ipa-overview/
  - concinds 5y ago
    Likewise, I don't firmly understand the technology behind this, or its privacy implications, and almost the entirety of this thread is just generic anti-ad sentiments, with some arguments about billboards, Mozilla's CEO compensation, ads being psychologically invasive, and people hoping we can bring the 2003-2004 web back (have they forgotten what Month is it? "the Web" didn't change, the audience did.) There are some solid comments here. I just wish people (who talk about advertisement ruining the web's signal-to-noise ratio) would recognize the importance of minimizing chronically-rehashed arguments and talk more coldly about techs and implications. I really empathize with any Mozilla employee browsing this; I criticize the Mozz every now and then, but this seems like a well-meaning proposal, that's beneficial for the web (my opinion, obviously people can argue otherwise) and advances Mozilla's mission, and they're getting shredded.
joelbondurant1 5y ago
snthd 5y ago
Part of why I value privacy is because I hate advertising and want to obstruct it as much as possible. It seems Mozilla's values are not my values.
browningstreet 5y ago
I've been around since before the web existed and I don't use a single Mozilla. I always install Firefox on a new machine, but it feels.. wrong. They keep trying to make it a "consumer" thing, whereas Chrome did just fine not doing that. They missed their chance when they were no longer the dev/geek standard, not sure who they're supposed to be claiming as their core user these days. This kind of thing definitely won't help.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
I’m a big proponent of a competitive open web. This is probably just more marketing companies coming up with more tracking attributes. I think Mozilla has great tech. Having said all of that. I don’t understand two things: 1. Ads isn’t the only way to make money on the net. So I’ve never understood Mozilla’s inability to get away from them (probably because they never wanted to). 2. Why no one else besides Google seems to have the funds to build a competing browser engine. Or at least to fund a developer team to fork Firefox. While Firefox might not be as plugin-able as Chromium, do we need another browser like Chromium or just a better lead Firefox? My concerns aren’t with Mozilla but rather maintaining an open competitive web through choice and competing engines. “UI Devs only test on one browser” commentary be damned.
- sfink 5y ago
  > 1. Ads isn’t the only way to make money on the net. So I’ve never understood Mozilla’s inability to get away from them (probably because they never wanted to). Other ways to make money are generally more accessible to the sites themselves, and so aren't very relevant when trying to fund a browser.
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    I disagree, there are plenty of other ways. Mozilla has just chosen to position themselves under this one.
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lrvick 5y ago
We do not need to work with Facebook and companies like them. We do not need to compromise with them. We need to starve them. Complex cryptography to try to make less bad ads feels like a nicotine patch when what we need is pictures of lung cancer on the cigarette boxes and laws that forbid addicting children. We need education so people enable ad blocking until online advertising ceases to be as viable of a business model. Surveillance capitalism corps must be forced to adapt and start charging people for the value they provide in a clear and honest way instead of trying to sell human psyche hacking as a service like a globally adopted casino of profit optimized manipulation. One we all let our kids participate in. People pay money for coffee. They can pay a tiny bit for bandwidth for use of Social Media like any other SaaS. Maybe if it costs a tiny bit people will ration their use of it a bit more and use their extra time to go learn something useful.
annadane 5y ago
Just to clarify - ublock origin is going to continue working the same way... right?
- ekr____ 5y ago
  As I noted above, this is just a document at the moment, so it's not in Firefox at all. With that I said, ublock origin blocks ads before they are loaded, so I would not expect an API of this type to affect it.
chobytes 5y ago
mozilla is continuing to burn up the last shreds of any good will they acquired a decade ago.
fartcannon 5y ago
There are many forks of Firefox these days. Librewolf on desktops, Mull on mobile. I haven't vetted them yet, but today I'm going to start.
iam-TJ 5y ago
I want to focus a comment on Mozilla Firefox generally. I see a lot of hate being expressed here but I do get a sense of entitlement from some comments. Firefox is a free-of-cost product and surely we all know by now that if you don't pay for it you're the product, not the customer. I don't allow tracking or advertising at all, whether from Internet services or local radio and TV (mostly do not use ad-supported stations), never had a Facebook/Twitter/etc., account, not used Google for the last decade, and so on. However, in exchange for avoiding tracking and adverts, I actively pay for services I appreciate in whatever way they provide for whether through purchase, subscription, or donation. I really wish Mozilla Corporation would have a DONATE TO FIREFOX option* to directly support development of the browser (and Thunderbird) and a max-privacy version. This would directly quantify real support from those like me that object to tracking and/or invasive adverts - I suspect the amount raised would be minimal, but it'd put the default search engine funding into perspective. Not a lot of people realise that donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT support Firefox development by Mozilla Corporation. * I was one of those that paid for Netscape Navigator back in the mid 1990s before Microsoft released Internet Explorer as part of the Windows OS and wiped out the paid-for browser market and forced Netscape Navigator to be released free of charge in order to try to compete - which directly led to Mozilla and Firefox.
- sfink 5y ago
  (I work for Mozilla) Firefox and Mozilla should be scrutinized to some degree. Firefox may be free of charge, and so I agree Mozilla is not directly beholden to its non-paying users. But it is beholden to its mission statement, and it's fair to criticize Mozilla for anything that might violate that statement. My understanding is that a "donate to Firefox" option is a logistical nightmare, would only be allowed in limited jurisdictions, and is not expected to earn all that much revenue. So in effect, the "donate to Firefox" button would end up mostly supporting the continued existence of the "donate to Firefox" button (lawyers ain't cheap!) Purchasing services even if you don't use them (eg Firefox VPN; I'm not sure what else has been released yet) is the most direct way of donating to Mozilla Corporation and thereby funding Firefox development. The most important component of which is my personal salary. Thanks in advance!
mleonhard 5y ago
Ad networks do three things to boost efficiency: 1. Attribution 1. Tailoring 1. Detecting fraud An ad network without any of these will be less efficient than its competitors. It will attract fewer ad buyers. Currently, all three of these things require tracking. Ad networks can use attribution to detect some fraud on popular sites & apps. This doesn't work for the long-tail of small sites and apps that don't generate many clicks. Ad buyers could buy ads directly from popular sites/apps. This just shifts the burden of detecting fraud from the ad network (which has the expertise to do it) to the ad buyer. This excludes small sites & apps, slowing the rate of innovation. The proposals for privacy-preserving ad tailoring all provide coarse tailoring (example: "interested in bicycles"). They do not allow precise tailoring like "interested in bicycle brand X product model Y". Precise tailoring is very efficient. I welcome all work on privacy-preserving ad-tech for these three areas: attribution, tailoring, and fraud-detection. It doesn't matter who develops a proposal. Let's examine the proposal and evaluate it on its merits. Eventually, we may end up with some combinations of techniques that allow efficient privacy-preserving ads.
driverdan 5y ago
This is user hostile and a betrayal. Firefox users have never asked for ad tracking. On the contrary, I'd guess most Firefox users are actively blocking ads. How can anyone at Mozilla honestly justify this?
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
Can we crowdfund for the guys of ungoogled chromium to provide official reproducible binaries? I feel completely out of luck looking for alternatives to Firefox. Last time a looked ungoogled chromium was being served by whoever was willing to build it and upload the binary, this doesn’t gives me a lot of trust. I also don’t have computer power/ Knowledge to build this behemoth. Ps. There will be a lot of shadowbans going on /r/Firefox this week. Last time I tried to politely complain there I was almost immediately shadowbanned.
commoner 5y ago
If you're moving away from Firefox because of this, but still don't want to use a Chromium or WebKit-based browser, consider these independently maintained Firefox forks: - LibreWolf (desktop): https://librewolf.net https://librewolf.net - Mull (Android): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/ Both LibreWolf and Mull enable strong privacy protections by default, while disabling potentially unwanted features (telemetry, Pocket, and the remote server checks of Google Safe Browsing). These browsers apply a set of patches over the core Firefox codebase, like Ungoogled Chromium does to Chromium.
concinds 5y ago
I expected this to be controversial here, but there's absolutely nothing wrong for Mozilla to partner with Meta on this, and there are excellent reasons for Meta to be willing to participate in good faith. It's real simple. iOS 15 really hurt Facebook, and Facebook's advertisers. Facebook would obviously rather do attribution through a privacy-preserving standard than not be able to do it at all. Apple's made it clear that those are Facebook's only long-term choices[0]. There are ways to get it done, and the industry should collaborate on it. [0]: by the way, do most people here know that Apple's been working for many years on an equivalent privacy-preserving attribution standard, just like this Mozilla-Meta proposal? That it's in Safari, today, right now? (Go in Preferences -> Privacy, and notice the "Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness" checkbox. Ticked by default!) Where's the outrage? Is this backlash really based on rational grounds?
freediver 5y ago
A risky move. If successful Mozilla will be double-dipping into ad money - getting paid both by Google and Facebook. But it can also be the last straw that breaks its reputation and accelerates its demise. Short term I predict the former to happen, to be followed by the latter.
seanhunter 5y ago
It's remarkable how much the debate around this topic has been poisoned by talking points from the data monitization industry. That the internet would completely cease to exist without the ability of the big ad giants to profile people's interests and sell cohorts of people with those interests to ad buyers or even worse to sell the data itself. The truth is: 1) Business models other than those depending on ad revenue exist. The internet would not disappear even if no advertising was ever shown to anybody. Yes it would be very different from the present internet. 2) Non-targeted advertising exists and is widely purchased. When I walk outside my door I see busses with adverts on the side, billboards on the side of the road and at public transport etc. None of these are targetted except perhaps in the most generalized fashion. 3) Even if we allow targetting, targetted advertising based on content rather than the consumer of that content exists and is successful (eg the ads that show as part of TV programming, ads in print media etc). This suggests that is highly likely that even if we just completely disallow all tracking of individuals and their interests, the internet advertising industry would continue to exist and to fund content by showing ads alongside content that is likely to attract the right audience, rather than being specifically spoonfed that audience by Google/Facebook etc. It is simply untrue that we have to work with people who want to do this sort of incredibly invasive thing, and in particular there is no reason for anyone ever to trust these particular organisations who not only have a vested interest in destroying people's privacy, have a track record of statements and actions showing that they have always considered doing so to be no big deal.

234 points by Santosh83 5y ago

Is this the Mozilla equivalent of Google 's Topics[1] (previously FLoC)? [1] https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics

ekr____ 5y ago
No. Topics is oriented at targeting ads to people with specific interests. This technology is designed to measure "conversion", e.g., when people click on an ad and then buy the corresponding product in a privacy-preserving way.
- richardfey 5y ago
  Alright, thanks!
cyral 5y ago
FLoC is for targeting, this is for attribution.

olliej 5y ago

How does this compare to WebKits privacy preserving attribution?

nottorp 5y ago
Safari is less resource hungry on Macs :) Or was before the last "redesign". I guess ungoogled chromium might be a solution. Or: what's a decent ad blocking solution for modern Safari?
ekr____ 5y ago
They have similar objectives but achieve them differently. Roughly, Private Click Measurement uses very low entropy identifiers to achieve rough of clicks and conversions. IPA uses multiparty computation instead. Probably the most salient differences are: PCM leaks some information about user behavior, but it has a high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X% chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don't collude). PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a laptop). IPA potentially does. Ben Savage's slides cover this in more detail: https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telecon/IPA%20design%20considerations%20-%20PAT-CG%20preso.pdf https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telec...
- olliej 5y ago
  The slides imply cross device/browser identification? I can't see how that happens without some kind of shared account mechanism. The slides imply that losing cross device attribution is a regression. It absolutely is not, as such ability does not currently exist. So this While I recognize the advertisers may want attribution, but it still seems like FB+Google both still want to know as much about the user as possible, and both definitely have the resources to achieve the de-anonymising attacks (especially given chrome's ever present attempts to get people to tie their entire browsing session to their google identity).
  - ekr____ 5y ago
    You're right that this assumes an account. The way that cross device/browser identification works in IPA is that if you are logged into example.com (though realistically, often Facebook) then it can set a "match key" which is the same on device and browser. You can't read the match key, only write it. This match key is used to link up activities on both. The point of the crypto is to rerandomize the match key that appears in the reports so that it is possible two see that two actions are from the same device but not link that back up to the original match key. Note that in this proposal, the assumption is that anyone would be able to use anyone else's match key (addressed by origin) so that it's not a big advantage to be the site with the account. Re whether this is a regression or not: I am not an expert on how the current attribution mechanism works but I believe that if people are logged into (for instance) Facebook then Facebook can use that to correlate clicks on device A with purchases on device B.
    - olliej 5y ago
      Except in browser's like Brave and Safari that actively work to break that kind of tracking - this feature essentially appears to mandate it.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Is this a joke?

v3ss0n 5y ago
Thats it , i am done , i had installed mozilla because of sympathy , now its time to uninstall.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  i've been bouncing between firefox and vivaldi lately, I think i've made up my mind
  - blondin 5y ago
    vivaldi had me with their vertical tabs. they were the first to do it natively and properly. but my excitement didn't last. i was having a hard time with their bazillion settings. i wanted something that works well out of the box. i know some people like all these possible options but it was not for me. nowadays, i use edge for vertical tabs. edge is chrome with vertical tabs in my world. but it would be cool if the minimized sidebar didn't expand on hover. it's a user experience nightmare. (in case any engineer on the edge project is reading)
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      i agree the settings were a bit overwhelming at first - but I eventually settled on something rather minimalistic and haven't changed anything since YMMV of course, and I just refuse to use Edge out of principle.

danShumway 5y ago

Oh. Bigger story here appears to be that the proposal is publicly editable and has already been vandalized. I'm not going to link to it, but I will say that I'm not thrilled that Mozilla is handling proposals using these formats/hosting choices. So much of this feels weird to me. I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard. I can't read up on the IPA standard because the link is currently being vandalized, so I can't really comment on that, but this is dangerous ground to tread and also I vaguely feel like as a user I might want to not have ads attributed across devices. Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the best browser to use for privacy right now. But crud this announcement is weird and vaguely tone-deaf and doesn't make me feel good, and I think at the very least it should have been worded less as a celebration, or at least should have spent more time going into why I shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the whole thing. It's potentially a longer conversation, but the article also doesn't really make a strong case for why I should be rooting for a privacy-respecting system for advertisers in the first place.

strulovich 5y ago
> I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the standard. I don’t think that’s why you want FB/Meta here. But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this actually becomes a solution. If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just wasting time. Assuming the competition is standard built by Google within itself, this makes sense. (Meta employee, don’t work on ads, opinions my own)
- MereInterest 5y ago
  > If you build a super private solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you’re just waiting time. Which is why regulation is needed. Otherwise, any solution needs to be more attractive to the advertisers than the people they stalk (i.e. everybody else).

saberworks 5y ago

Ugh, it's like they're trying to drive users away.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yet another useless thing for uBlock Origin to get rid of. Why are browsers going out of their way to help advertisers in the first place?

jqpabc123 5y ago
Why? Money. Mozilla gets hundreds of millions of $ from Google every year? Any wonder why Mozilla was the last one to jump on the privacy bandwagon? And now they are holding hands with another big privacy invader.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

akomtu 5y ago

Targeted advertising cannot simultaneously know everything about a user_id and respect privacy of that user_id. Every bit of privacy is an extra user_id's attribute that could be used for more accurate advertising.

mqus 5y ago
In their defense, this is not really about targeting (afaict) but rather understanding how many people saw/clicked on that ad.
aaomidi 5y ago
This isn't really about targeting specific users, rather seeing overall aggregated metrics.

gigel82 5y ago

"Privacy Preserving" and Meta do not belong in the same sentence. I guess they want some financial contributions from Meta too since Google's don't cover the C-tier compensation bump.

Macha 5y ago

If Mozilla's browser supports a way for advertisers to track me, be it for attribution, fraud prevention, targeting or any other person, then what is the point in using it over ungoogled-chromium? Mozilla's reputation in my view has sure taken a beating these last few years, and without the details of the proposal (thanks to their own fuckup), it's hard not to assume the worst.

errantmind 5y ago
If there is no way to disable this 'feature', I will stop using Firefox entirely.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  And, as with DNT, by disabling it you'll just add another feature for identifying you.
  - Macha 5y ago
    1 bit seems pretty preferable to something which people will pretty quickly find a way to turn into a user ID
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      Maybe - it depends on how much that bit is weighted.
  - rascul 5y ago
    I thought it was the other way around. As it was generally disabled by default, enabling it gave another data point for fingerprinting. But maybe I don't recall correctly.
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      Either way it works. It's just a feature. What the big issue was was that some browsers would enable it by default and some wouldn't, and then you'd have differences across versions, etc. So it became a more powerful feature.

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

> Mozilla Partners with [Facebook] on Privacy Okay, until now I gave them some benefit of the doubt. Now Mozilla don’t even try to hide how hypocritical they are.

paxys 5y ago
It's not like they have ever hidden it. Pretty much all Mozilla revenue comes from their deals with Google.
- franga2000 5y ago
  Why do people insist on using this as a point?? It's just guilt by association! Taking Google's money has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. Google paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine. That in no way decreases the privacy for the user and it gets Mozilla the funding they need to develop privacy-enhancing features that do benefit the user.
  - account42 5y ago
    Do you really expect anyone who thinks that making 500k/y instead of millions is not a sacrifice they should be asked to make to do anything to risk their primary source of funding? The money from Google doesn't just buy the default serch engine setting, it is a HUGE incentive for Mozilla to not rock the boat.
  - paxys 5y ago
    Because it is a data point. Sure it isn't a smoking gun pointing to malpractice, but if they are getting $500M/yr from Google, getting into partnerships with Facebook, and continue to make similar moves down the line, you have to question where they can truly be independent enough to be 100% on the consumer's side.
    - themacguffinman 5y ago
      How is that a real data point? Like you said, it just raises questions, it doesn't actually tell you anything. Literally all you're doing is casting vague aspersions.

fxtentacle 5y ago

Why? Mozilla was one of the last companies giving people what they want, which is a web browser without tracking and without bloat. This to me feels like Mozilla's management has abandoned the values that made me choose them over Chrome.

staticassertion 5y ago

I assume this is another cash grab by Mozilla executives as they squeeze the last of the value out of the movement they've tanked.

mfrw 5y ago

"In a shocking turn of events:" -- That's what I would say without even reading!

PascLeRasc 5y ago

The link labeled “IPA overview” is NSFW.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

I would love to have ears on the internal dev channels right about now.

Aachen 5y ago
Particularly their DM chats: bossmang might be in the channels and (might need to) have different opinions from the actual devs.

leokennis 5y ago

So now there is only one browser that won’t track you, and it’s Safari.

ekr____ 5y ago
Two clarifying points: 1. This is a technical proposal. It has not been incorporated into Firefox; I don't think there are even patches for it at this point. 2. Safari actually already implements a different technology designed to achieve somewhat similar objectives. https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-measurement-pcm/ https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...

endisneigh 5y ago

Why even bother with Mozilla at this point? Partnering with the one of the top sources of spyware?

suby 5y ago

Clearly not something being done for the benefit of the users. I don't want any of my information (supposedly anonymized or not) from my browser leaking to advertisers if I can help it, and here my browser provider is taking steps to help facilitate this transfer. I'm really losing trust with Mozilla between moves like this, their in-browser advertising, their continual re-enabling of the user studies telemetry writing over my disabling of it (has happened at least 3x times). You can't monetize your users if they all stop using your browser, Mozilla. We need an alternative.

thekingofh 5y ago

Here’s the problem with aggregation. Even if the if is not attributable to you as an individual the data can still be used as a weapon against you. I’ll give an example: Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly. The indirect aggregated data is just as harmful as if they had targeted you personally. This is where companies try to fool you into thinking you are safe to give them a “non identifiable” advertising id and aggregating your data before selling it. It’s not safe.

kmlx 5y ago
> Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more than enough to target that group while still not using your personal data directly. 1. what’s stopping current governments doing exactly that right now? 2. how much of the market do you think fits that scenario? 3. what’s stopping people in that scenario trying to protect themselves via the usual methods independent of whatever browser they choose?

jacquesm 5y ago

Checks date: No, it's not April 1st. Which would have been a fine day to make this announcement and possibly get away with it. In case you were still on the fence... Mozilla has been trying very hard to eradicate the enormous amount of goodwill they built up over the year. Oh, and it's Facebook, not 'Meta'.

birdyrooster 5y ago
I think it’s Meta now. There was a video where Zuckerberg dressed up like Steve Jobs and described Second Life.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  They're not fooling me. These whitewashes should be ignored, and the name should simply always be prepended by the name under which the entity is generally known. Otherwise the likes of Blackwater get to pretend they are Xe or Academi or some other nice clean corporate identity. Google gets a little bit of leeway because their holding really acts as a holding but in the case of Facebook it is just so you don't immediately associate the name 'Meta' with something vile and ugly. 'Facebook partners with Mozilla' has a different ring to it.

jerry1979 5y ago

Thinking high level, does anyone have a sense of how many folks get paid to work on Firefox? Which projects currently under the Mozilla/Firefox umbrella are worth splitting off and funding?

errantmind 5y ago

> Advertising provides critical support for the Web The premise is flawed, IMO. I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. If it disappeared it would still be fine. Some sites would die out, others would rise. I've said it before, but I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away. I also think this would improve the signal:noise ratio of the web considerably.

nicce 5y ago
> I remember a time when the web was just fine without incessant advertising. That is from the time when not everyone was in the web. Now as basically everyone is here, it is the best place to affect on the minds of people.
nojs 5y ago
> I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away That would arguably include HN, which publishes some sponsored threads for YC companies
- errantmind 5y ago
  I suppose I should have specified "paid advertising". I personally don't see self-promotion as an issue.
concinds 5y ago
Thought experiment. Remove all ads from Facebook. Now, the only way corporations can advertise on Facebook is by making Facebook posts on their normal Facebook page; people only see them if they "liked" the company's FB page. What you've done is slightly reduced huge corporations' advertising effectiveness; and absolutely killed every small internet brand. There's people starting cool clothing, food, perfume, watch brands, starting these companies from rock bottom, getting customers through online ads, and becoming millionaires. The vast majority aren't dropshipper idiots; they're legit brands, many of which eventually get acquired by a Fortune 500 corp. This isn't the 90s. Online ads are just essential to getting companies off the ground nowadays. What should people do? Mail-order magazine ads? (still ads.) Cold calling? (isn't that more intrusive than online ads?) There's other aspects too. Kill online ads and you kill a huge chunk of the social mobility that results from entrepreneurship. There's two paths to wealth nowadays: getting a great job, or starting a company. In your ideal world, the only "path" left is the same old "golden path" our parents talked about, of going to a good college, getting 1 or more degrees, and getting a highly paid career at a big corp or SV startup. For various, well-documented reasons, that system ends up excluding tons of people (many ethnic/gender minorities, people with "difficult life paths" who end up dropping out or are unemployable because of gaps in their resume, ex-felons who have paid their debt to society but aren't going to become Apple VPs anytime soon, undocumented immigrants, and many more). Entrepreneurship is an equalizer. The anti-ad kneejerk reaction often comes from an anti-bigcorp philosophy; but it would only strengthen big corps, and harm any small companies trying to compete. You'd significantly weaken one of the best mechanism we have to reduce social/wealth inequality (entrepreneurship). You have people like HVAC specialists and plumbers advertising their services on Facebook. On the contrary, I think it would be extremely sinister is just a few big corps (browser makers) could harm huge chunks of the economy and society by mortally crippling the best way entrepreneurs have of getting customers. I rarely see anti-ad people address any of these concerns. Think of the ramifications; how about every reputable news source being behind a paywall, leaving fake news sites spreading wildly? I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other dangerous ramifications yourself.

BoysenberryPi 5y ago

There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over the coals for this so I don't need to do it. That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search engine.

account42 5y ago
> That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a browser as your primary product is just not profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. Why does it need to be profitable? Firefox is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the corp is only there to help develop it. If the corp can't work without making the browser work then the foundation should reconsider if the corp is a good idea. Unfortunately, the leadership of the foundation and the corp are not separate enough so they cannot effectively push for the interests of the foundation.
notyourday 5y ago
Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean that it will have to become a product company rather than another bored housewives club masquerading as a software company with some software engineers working for it.
- kmlx 5y ago
  > Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who would pay $100/year for it. why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?
  - lolinder 5y ago
    If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.

DavideNL 5y ago

This feels like a very bad development. Out of curiosity.... what would the best alternative to Firefox be, in regards to privacy? (macOS/Ubuntu/Windows)

assemblylang 5y ago
Librewolf[0] is probably the best alternative, drop-in replacement for firefox in terms of privacy. It's essentially (base firefox + privacy patches + privacy policies and configs), and available on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and more. edit: Expect though that some parts of the web won't work with it since WebGL and DRM are disabled. [0] https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
chobytes 5y ago
have been using librewolf. seems like a good balance of "not mozilla" and usable.

nolok 5y ago

So I understand they're doing this because it's their revenue source and they feel they have to play ball, but this pretty much means they're done. After having lost many battles and flags the one thing they have is that they're not helping them spy on you, it's barely enough to keep them relevant, and they want to dump that too. That's what happens when the people in charge of taking the decisions are not representative of the core users of the product, and thus don't understand what makes the product good or bad for their users. You will not find 1% of current Firefox users by choice who would say they think this is a good decision.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
There is still money to squeeze for C-Suites.

hericium 5y ago

Could've been handled better. Mozilla is Google's bitch.

Jerry2 5y ago

Call me cynical but I'm guessing that Meta just made a large donation to Mozilla and in turn they're using Mozilla to whitewash this proposal. They're just buying Mozilla's reputation (what's left of it) for their purposes. FTA: >We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy. Mozilla's is basically looking for a unicorn. If they really cared about user privacy, they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by default. However, if you look at where their revenue is coming from, you quickly realize why that will never happen.

akersten 5y ago
> they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by default. In theory they do - the Tracking Protection thingy is on by default last I checked. I guess dirty money's hard to resist.
- jefftk 5y ago
  It is not on by default: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Tracking_Protection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Trackin...
  - ekr____ 5y ago
    The naming around the various features is confusing. Briefly: - Tracking Protection basically blocks connections to known trackers entirely so the resources don't even load. - Enhanced Tracking Protection prevents various kinds of cross-site tracking by blocking cookies, etc. (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...). ETP is on by default. TP is not.
    - Jerry2 5y ago
      I found this paper interesting [1] and how they characterize Firefox' behavior out of the box: We investigate the request behavior of each browser (Figure 7). Brave is the most effective at reducing third- party tracking-and-advertising requests; its claim to (1) is supported. The other privacy-focused browsers vary significantly in terms of reducing third-party tracking- and-advertising requests. Firefox Focus and Ghostery differ significantly in how much they reduce third- party tracking-and-advertising requests, but the perfor- mance of both supports their claims, (1) and (2). Fire- fox is least effective at reducing third-party tracking- and-advertising requests. This is unsurprising, as Fire- fox’s enabled-by-default “standard” tracking protection “blocks fewer trackers” [79]. It errs on the side of caution in what it blocks, focusing on restricting tracking cook- ies, social-media trackers, and fingerprinting scripts; it does not block other content (loaded ads, videos) that may perform tracking [78, 105]. Thus, while Firefox claims (2), its blocking of tracking and advertising is limited with its default settings. This is quite disappointing given Mozilla's marketing around privacy. [1] https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-2022-0012.pdf https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/popets-202...

huhtenberg 5y ago

Fuuuuuck. Jesus Fucking Christ, Mozilla. You are just really set on annihilating what's left of your userbase, aren't you? Was it a rider in the contact for using Google as a default search engine? It's just gotta be, because it's hard to think of any other reason for something this anti-user being peddled with such a straight face. Working with THE worst perpetrator that is known for its complete and utter disregard for people's privacy on some PRIVACY PRESERVING bullshit feature. WHAT THE PROVERBIAL FUCK. I am speechless. (A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days).

ModernMech 5y ago
> A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days I know, talk about dying a young as a hero or living long enough to become a villain.
ramesh31 5y ago
The Mozilla we knew and loved for decades died some time around 2015-ish. Sales and marketing completely took over the organization. They've been slashing engineering projects, and pushing these "key partnerships" nonstop since then. It's very obvious the executive team there couldn't care less about the original mission anymore. Their last remaining meaningful product (Firefox) is essentially in maintenance mode at this point. It's sad to say, but they are now just another tech company interested in nothing but mining your personal data for profit.
dang 5y ago
Please make your substantive points without fulminating. Perhaps you don't owe privacy preserving advertising attributing browsers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  I though you'd might have a problem with my comment. This is however an exceptional situation, a piece of news so shocking and unwelcome that the only way I can properly express the level of frustration with it is through the use of expletives and the uppercase. It is absolutely disheartening to see a long-lived and excellent piece of software being so ruthlessly, cynically and systematically destroyed. It really makes my blood boil.

2wrist 5y ago

Ah FFS.

v3ss0n 5y ago

What have you done Mozilla...

sgift 5y ago

I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it's hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies. In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist? If the answer is no, that's it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow. This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all. If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. So, if a proposal isn't somehow either accepted by Facebook or forced on them it is already dead. I don't think Mozilla has the market power for the second variant, so only the first one is possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap. So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
It's not black and white you can do advertising without "personalisation."
- hedora 5y ago
  Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop. Yes, that would destroy a few incumbents' business models. No, it wouldn't be the end of Google's ad business. According to multiple press releases I've seen, blocking tracking makes ads and marketing about 30% less effective. As a society, that'd mean some combination of increasing ad impressions by 30% and reducing total ad spend (since currently marginal ad campaigns will become unprofitable). That sounds completely acceptable to me, especially if it frees up smart people to work on stuff that actually benefits society in some way.
  - 5y ago

humanwhosits 5y ago

Last thing I want is my browser helping advertisers

comfrey 5y ago

How much did Meta contribute to Moz as a part of the deal?

acqbu 5y ago

major red flag

xaxaxb 5y ago

As a non-profit working on a browser, I don't get what the need is to "partner" with an advertising company. It's like they are saying ads are necessary evil. But who gains from that? Corps obv. Why not partner with another ad company Google? Oh...because they have chrome.

ekr____ 5y ago
What "partner" in this case means is "Mozilla engineers collaborated with Meta engineers on developing this proposal". We also routinely partner with Google engineers on technical proposals, see, for instance: QUIC Version Negotiation. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-version-negotiation https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-versio...
- xaxaxb 5y ago
  Thanks for the response.

jevoten 5y ago

I am unable to view the linked overview [1] of this privacy preserving technology - Google demands I sign in to view the document. Not a good start. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks0yv2j22pA5SrAD9av4s/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks... - omitting the "/edit" suffix does not help

Sophira 5y ago
My guess is that this is because it was publicly editable and was being vandalised, according to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306105 Feels like it would have been better for them to make it view-only/editable by specific people rather than hiding the entire thing, but there you go.
- jevoten 5y ago
  I'm sure they had practical reasons, but the point is that privacy wasn't even considered.

wirrbel 5y ago

Somewhat glad to have moved on to Safari about a year ago (decade-long Firefox user).

jonathankoren 5y ago

Prio is very awesome. It’s homomorphic encryption that allows for aggregate statistics and an auditable, and potentially vetoable, queries. No one can run a query and get valid data back unless all parties agree. When I was at Mozilla I was wanting to use Prio as a privacy layer for federated learning, and audience interest statistics for advertising. Looks like someone finally listened. Congrats team.

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robbedpeter 5y ago

The fox and the weasel partnered on chicken preserving policy for the henhouse.

ddtaylor 5y ago

> We’ve been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions without harming privacy. You're probably going to find that any "solution" to the problem involves violating their consent. People don't want their movements tracked and sold to the highest bidder - regardless of how many different ways you slice it up. If you give users a real choice in the matter without obscuring it or providing UI friction the users will choose not to have their data tracked and sold.

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kup0 5y ago

I wish the company/organization behind my favorite and only browser didn't continue to be so tone-deaf. Their reputation in my mind had already been soured, in spite of them having the best browser for my use. Now they make a ludicrous decision to involve Meta in what they think are privacy discussions? I cannot be swayed into seeing Meta's involvement as anything other than a detriment

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zamalek 5y ago

This might be a bit controversial, given the large amount of "F Mozilla" comments already present. The problem is the advertising industry, not advertising. Run a thought experiment quickly, let's say you wanted to start a pro-privacy/anti-malvertising/anti-flashing-bullshit advertising service (the tasteful ads that the likes of daringfireball sometimes features): There's a thousand obvious things you can do: text-only, having the author select "adwords," etc. The problem you'll face no matter what is click-harvesting, how do you know that a real person has clicked the ad? Facebook was the wrong fucking partner here, but maybe attacking or deliberating on the technical aspects of the specification would be a better discussion. If this thing isn't supposed to track us, then we should probably figure out if it actually achieves that, instead of frothing at the mouth. Browsers are going to implement it one way or another.

gbear605 5y ago
Ad tracking doesn’t need to be click based. Modern advertisements have existed for two hundred years and tracking has existed for twenty.
Aachen 5y ago
This. I didn't quite understand the multiparty computation thing, so I came here for someone to explain it without bias (since of course the authors would claim it's the best thing since sliced bread or, more recently, https). Well, I found bias and no explanations. I'm getting to various comments without any replies so I think I'm almost at the bottom, from here it's only downvoted comments to go...
- ekr____ 5y ago
  It took me a little time, but here's a hopefully readable description of how it works: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ipa-overview/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/ipa-overview/
- concinds 5y ago
  Likewise, I don't firmly understand the technology behind this, or its privacy implications, and almost the entirety of this thread is just generic anti-ad sentiments, with some arguments about billboards, Mozilla's CEO compensation, ads being psychologically invasive, and people hoping we can bring the 2003-2004 web back (have they forgotten what Month is it? "the Web" didn't change, the audience did.) There are some solid comments here. I just wish people (who talk about advertisement ruining the web's signal-to-noise ratio) would recognize the importance of minimizing chronically-rehashed arguments and talk more coldly about techs and implications. I really empathize with any Mozilla employee browsing this; I criticize the Mozz every now and then, but this seems like a well-meaning proposal, that's beneficial for the web (my opinion, obviously people can argue otherwise) and advances Mozilla's mission, and they're getting shredded.

joelbondurant1 5y ago

snthd 5y ago

Part of why I value privacy is because I hate advertising and want to obstruct it as much as possible. It seems Mozilla's values are not my values.

browningstreet 5y ago

I've been around since before the web existed and I don't use a single Mozilla. I always install Firefox on a new machine, but it feels.. wrong. They keep trying to make it a "consumer" thing, whereas Chrome did just fine not doing that. They missed their chance when they were no longer the dev/geek standard, not sure who they're supposed to be claiming as their core user these days. This kind of thing definitely won't help.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

I’m a big proponent of a competitive open web. This is probably just more marketing companies coming up with more tracking attributes. I think Mozilla has great tech. Having said all of that. I don’t understand two things: 1. Ads isn’t the only way to make money on the net. So I’ve never understood Mozilla’s inability to get away from them (probably because they never wanted to). 2. Why no one else besides Google seems to have the funds to build a competing browser engine. Or at least to fund a developer team to fork Firefox. While Firefox might not be as plugin-able as Chromium, do we need another browser like Chromium or just a better lead Firefox? My concerns aren’t with Mozilla but rather maintaining an open competitive web through choice and competing engines. “UI Devs only test on one browser” commentary be damned.

sfink 5y ago
> 1. Ads isn’t the only way to make money on the net. So I’ve never understood Mozilla’s inability to get away from them (probably because they never wanted to). Other ways to make money are generally more accessible to the sites themselves, and so aren't very relevant when trying to fund a browser.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  I disagree, there are plenty of other ways. Mozilla has just chosen to position themselves under this one.

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lrvick 5y ago

We do not need to work with Facebook and companies like them. We do not need to compromise with them. We need to starve them. Complex cryptography to try to make less bad ads feels like a nicotine patch when what we need is pictures of lung cancer on the cigarette boxes and laws that forbid addicting children. We need education so people enable ad blocking until online advertising ceases to be as viable of a business model. Surveillance capitalism corps must be forced to adapt and start charging people for the value they provide in a clear and honest way instead of trying to sell human psyche hacking as a service like a globally adopted casino of profit optimized manipulation. One we all let our kids participate in. People pay money for coffee. They can pay a tiny bit for bandwidth for use of Social Media like any other SaaS. Maybe if it costs a tiny bit people will ration their use of it a bit more and use their extra time to go learn something useful.

annadane 5y ago

Just to clarify - ublock origin is going to continue working the same way... right?

ekr____ 5y ago
As I noted above, this is just a document at the moment, so it's not in Firefox at all. With that I said, ublock origin blocks ads before they are loaded, so I would not expect an API of this type to affect it.

chobytes 5y ago

mozilla is continuing to burn up the last shreds of any good will they acquired a decade ago.

fartcannon 5y ago

There are many forks of Firefox these days. Librewolf on desktops, Mull on mobile. I haven't vetted them yet, but today I'm going to start.

iam-TJ 5y ago

I want to focus a comment on Mozilla Firefox generally. I see a lot of hate being expressed here but I do get a sense of entitlement from some comments. Firefox is a free-of-cost product and surely we all know by now that if you don't pay for it you're the product, not the customer. I don't allow tracking or advertising at all, whether from Internet services or local radio and TV (mostly do not use ad-supported stations), never had a Facebook/Twitter/etc., account, not used Google for the last decade, and so on. However, in exchange for avoiding tracking and adverts, I actively pay for services I appreciate in whatever way they provide for whether through purchase, subscription, or donation. I really wish Mozilla Corporation would have a DONATE TO FIREFOX option* to directly support development of the browser (and Thunderbird) and a max-privacy version. This would directly quantify real support from those like me that object to tracking and/or invasive adverts - I suspect the amount raised would be minimal, but it'd put the default search engine funding into perspective. Not a lot of people realise that donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT support Firefox development by Mozilla Corporation. * I was one of those that paid for Netscape Navigator back in the mid 1990s before Microsoft released Internet Explorer as part of the Windows OS and wiped out the paid-for browser market and forced Netscape Navigator to be released free of charge in order to try to compete - which directly led to Mozilla and Firefox.

sfink 5y ago
(I work for Mozilla) Firefox and Mozilla should be scrutinized to some degree. Firefox may be free of charge, and so I agree Mozilla is not directly beholden to its non-paying users. But it is beholden to its mission statement, and it's fair to criticize Mozilla for anything that might violate that statement. My understanding is that a "donate to Firefox" option is a logistical nightmare, would only be allowed in limited jurisdictions, and is not expected to earn all that much revenue. So in effect, the "donate to Firefox" button would end up mostly supporting the continued existence of the "donate to Firefox" button (lawyers ain't cheap!) Purchasing services even if you don't use them (eg Firefox VPN; I'm not sure what else has been released yet) is the most direct way of donating to Mozilla Corporation and thereby funding Firefox development. The most important component of which is my personal salary. Thanks in advance!

mleonhard 5y ago

Ad networks do three things to boost efficiency: 1. Attribution 1. Tailoring 1. Detecting fraud An ad network without any of these will be less efficient than its competitors. It will attract fewer ad buyers. Currently, all three of these things require tracking. Ad networks can use attribution to detect some fraud on popular sites & apps. This doesn't work for the long-tail of small sites and apps that don't generate many clicks. Ad buyers could buy ads directly from popular sites/apps. This just shifts the burden of detecting fraud from the ad network (which has the expertise to do it) to the ad buyer. This excludes small sites & apps, slowing the rate of innovation. The proposals for privacy-preserving ad tailoring all provide coarse tailoring (example: "interested in bicycles"). They do not allow precise tailoring like "interested in bicycle brand X product model Y". Precise tailoring is very efficient. I welcome all work on privacy-preserving ad-tech for these three areas: attribution, tailoring, and fraud-detection. It doesn't matter who develops a proposal. Let's examine the proposal and evaluate it on its merits. Eventually, we may end up with some combinations of techniques that allow efficient privacy-preserving ads.

driverdan 5y ago

This is user hostile and a betrayal. Firefox users have never asked for ad tracking. On the contrary, I'd guess most Firefox users are actively blocking ads. How can anyone at Mozilla honestly justify this?

arepublicadoceu 5y ago

Can we crowdfund for the guys of ungoogled chromium to provide official reproducible binaries? I feel completely out of luck looking for alternatives to Firefox. Last time a looked ungoogled chromium was being served by whoever was willing to build it and upload the binary, this doesn’t gives me a lot of trust. I also don’t have computer power/ Knowledge to build this behemoth. Ps. There will be a lot of shadowbans going on /r/Firefox this week. Last time I tried to politely complain there I was almost immediately shadowbanned.

commoner 5y ago

If you're moving away from Firefox because of this, but still don't want to use a Chromium or WebKit-based browser, consider these independently maintained Firefox forks: - LibreWolf (desktop): https://librewolf.net https://librewolf.net - Mull (Android): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/ Both LibreWolf and Mull enable strong privacy protections by default, while disabling potentially unwanted features (telemetry, Pocket, and the remote server checks of Google Safe Browsing). These browsers apply a set of patches over the core Firefox codebase, like Ungoogled Chromium does to Chromium.

concinds 5y ago

I expected this to be controversial here, but there's absolutely nothing wrong for Mozilla to partner with Meta on this, and there are excellent reasons for Meta to be willing to participate in good faith. It's real simple. iOS 15 really hurt Facebook, and Facebook's advertisers. Facebook would obviously rather do attribution through a privacy-preserving standard than not be able to do it at all. Apple's made it clear that those are Facebook's only long-term choices[0]. There are ways to get it done, and the industry should collaborate on it. [0]: by the way, do most people here know that Apple's been working for many years on an equivalent privacy-preserving attribution standard, just like this Mozilla-Meta proposal? That it's in Safari, today, right now? (Go in Preferences -> Privacy, and notice the "Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness" checkbox. Ticked by default!) Where's the outrage? Is this backlash really based on rational grounds?

freediver 5y ago

A risky move. If successful Mozilla will be double-dipping into ad money - getting paid both by Google and Facebook. But it can also be the last straw that breaks its reputation and accelerates its demise. Short term I predict the former to happen, to be followed by the latter.

seanhunter 5y ago

It's remarkable how much the debate around this topic has been poisoned by talking points from the data monitization industry. That the internet would completely cease to exist without the ability of the big ad giants to profile people's interests and sell cohorts of people with those interests to ad buyers or even worse to sell the data itself. The truth is: 1) Business models other than those depending on ad revenue exist. The internet would not disappear even if no advertising was ever shown to anybody. Yes it would be very different from the present internet. 2) Non-targeted advertising exists and is widely purchased. When I walk outside my door I see busses with adverts on the side, billboards on the side of the road and at public transport etc. None of these are targetted except perhaps in the most generalized fashion. 3) Even if we allow targetting, targetted advertising based on content rather than the consumer of that content exists and is successful (eg the ads that show as part of TV programming, ads in print media etc). This suggests that is highly likely that even if we just completely disallow all tracking of individuals and their interests, the internet advertising industry would continue to exist and to fund content by showing ads alongside content that is likely to attract the right audience, rather than being specifically spoonfed that audience by Google/Facebook etc. It is simply untrue that we have to work with people who want to do this sort of incredibly invasive thing, and in particular there is no reason for anyone ever to trust these particular organisations who not only have a vested interest in destroying people's privacy, have a track record of statements and actions showing that they have always considered doing so to be no big deal.