5 ms·

I do find it somewhat ironic that the demo page includes the old > If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

I do find it somewhat ironic that the demo page includes the old > If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/demo/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/demo/ I also find the name "collusion" unfortunate. Part of my paycheck comes from advertising, and I include google analytics on my site. However, I also work hard to have a crystal clear privacy policy and I don't opt in to the shared analytics logging for my site, so the data only goes to me. But I'm lumped in with the scummiest of ad networks. Mozilla, of course, offers a free browser. Their funding ultimately comes from the "collusion" they're talking about here and the search traffic they generate feeds it. More directly, you can argue that they sell our search data to the highest(?) bidder. Why isn't DDG the default search provider? Why aren't third party cookies disabled by default and the Do Not Track header enabled by default? These are actually hard questions, and trite soundbites that ignore actual economics and the tensions inherent in the internet we have today do us no favors. Transparency is the answer in many of these problems we've created for ourselves, I believe, but we need to be able to talk about them with equal intellectual clarity. edit: as an example, I really liked EFF's Peter Eckersley's quotes in the ars technica article on DNT today: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/can-do-not-track-tame-the-webs-cookie-monsters.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/can-do-not-t...

baltcode 15y ago
Aren't Mozilla products open source? Someone should offer a pro-privacy flavor which has these settings by default.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  Why not Mozilla? They developed the Collusion reporter, but why not attack the problem by bundling privacy tools like Ghostery with Firefox?
  - gcp 15y ago
    Ghostery still requires you to somewhat know what you're doing (if you block too much, sites stop working). It's not something that you can bundle by default.
    - cpeterso 15y ago
      Good point. I know Ghostery's default settings break Disqus comments and NY Times videos.
gcp 15y ago
What is your criticism here exactly, given that you find this "ironic"? You call for transparency - that's exactly what the published tool provides. I think the understanding is that advertising is required for many free things on the net (including Firefox), but that unless advertising behaves in a reasonable manner, and the user has some control and understanding over it, it'll be self-defeating as everybody will go start running Adblock, Ghostery, etc. Do Not Track works due to exactly the same economics. I think there was a public statement that if Do Not Track were enabled by default - no-one would respect it. There is no conflict of interest here. You either self-police or you're shut down.
- magicalist 15y ago
  My criticism is exactly what I wrote. If that "you're the product" statement is always true, then we are necessarily Mozilla's product that they sell to Google. If it's not always true or is in no way an informative reductive statement (in that all economic gradients could be "products" in a trivial sense), then it should be dropped from the page because it serves as nothing more than a (disingenuous) marketing slogan. The purpose of this tool is ostensibly activism from transparency, not activism from the rabble-roused. It's a similar argument for the name "collusion". Good marketing, yes, and maybe that's important to get attention and the name isn't that negative. At the same time, it paints everyone with the same brush when, again, the ostensible goal is not to shut down all ad networks on the internet, or the sites that are funded by them, but to give transparency into the links between the ad networks and the sites we visit, in order to hopefully force responsible behavior and give plain choices to end users. And that's why I pointed to the EFF's statements in that article. They acknowledge the tensions inherent in the internet we've built and inherited, and postulate that it's possible to force everyone to be better actors without having to burn the house down. Moreover that meaning is exactly what they say, without resorting too much to rhetoric.
bzbarsky 15y ago
> Why isn't DDG the default search provider? An excellent question. Does DDG have the infrastructure to handle that many searches? It didn't last I checked... > Why aren't third party cookies disabled by default Because it breaks things entirely unrelated to ads. For example, with third-party cookies disabled I can't buy tickets to http://www.puppetshowplace.org/ http://www.puppetshowplace.org/ online for my kids. > and the Do Not Track header enabled by default Because then it would be completely useless. See http://blog.mozilla.com/privacy/2011/11/09/dnt-cannot-be-default/ http://blog.mozilla.com/privacy/2011/11/09/dnt-cannot-be-def... I do agree that there needs to be a distinction between "showing ads" and "tracking users", of course. Those are not the same thing.
- epi0Bauqu 15y ago
  We can handle the traffic.

baltcode 15y ago

Aren't Mozilla products open source? Someone should offer a pro-privacy flavor which has these settings by default.

cpeterso 15y ago
Why not Mozilla? They developed the Collusion reporter, but why not attack the problem by bundling privacy tools like Ghostery with Firefox?
- gcp 15y ago
  Ghostery still requires you to somewhat know what you're doing (if you block too much, sites stop working). It's not something that you can bundle by default.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    Good point. I know Ghostery's default settings break Disqus comments and NY Times videos.

gcp 15y ago

What is your criticism here exactly, given that you find this "ironic"? You call for transparency - that's exactly what the published tool provides. I think the understanding is that advertising is required for many free things on the net (including Firefox), but that unless advertising behaves in a reasonable manner, and the user has some control and understanding over it, it'll be self-defeating as everybody will go start running Adblock, Ghostery, etc. Do Not Track works due to exactly the same economics. I think there was a public statement that if Do Not Track were enabled by default - no-one would respect it. There is no conflict of interest here. You either self-police or you're shut down.

magicalist 15y ago
My criticism is exactly what I wrote. If that "you're the product" statement is always true, then we are necessarily Mozilla's product that they sell to Google. If it's not always true or is in no way an informative reductive statement (in that all economic gradients could be "products" in a trivial sense), then it should be dropped from the page because it serves as nothing more than a (disingenuous) marketing slogan. The purpose of this tool is ostensibly activism from transparency, not activism from the rabble-roused. It's a similar argument for the name "collusion". Good marketing, yes, and maybe that's important to get attention and the name isn't that negative. At the same time, it paints everyone with the same brush when, again, the ostensible goal is not to shut down all ad networks on the internet, or the sites that are funded by them, but to give transparency into the links between the ad networks and the sites we visit, in order to hopefully force responsible behavior and give plain choices to end users. And that's why I pointed to the EFF's statements in that article. They acknowledge the tensions inherent in the internet we've built and inherited, and postulate that it's possible to force everyone to be better actors without having to burn the house down. Moreover that meaning is exactly what they say, without resorting too much to rhetoric.

bzbarsky 15y ago

> Why isn't DDG the default search provider? An excellent question. Does DDG have the infrastructure to handle that many searches? It didn't last I checked... > Why aren't third party cookies disabled by default Because it breaks things entirely unrelated to ads. For example, with third-party cookies disabled I can't buy tickets to http://www.puppetshowplace.org/ http://www.puppetshowplace.org/ online for my kids. > and the Do Not Track header enabled by default Because then it would be completely useless. See http://blog.mozilla.com/privacy/2011/11/09/dnt-cannot-be-default/ http://blog.mozilla.com/privacy/2011/11/09/dnt-cannot-be-def... I do agree that there needs to be a distinction between "showing ads" and "tracking users", of course. Those are not the same thing.

epi0Bauqu 15y ago
We can handle the traffic.