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Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128
- ranger_danger 2y agoNot taking sides here, but does anyone actually think that people will use strictly opt-in features at all? They went to the trouble to develop it so if you were them, why should it be so hidden as to have barely any users? I feel the same way about debugging telemetry... it's so valuable for developers and yet people want to see you hang if it's not (at best) a manual opt-in, but they don't care that it won't be used by anyone in that case.
- pacifika 2y agoWhy should users opt in to a feature if they perceive it has no value to them? So what developers should be asking is how they can make it directly valuable to the user to enable the feature. User led not business led. Reliability ratings, notifying of fixed reported crashes, improvements in performance telemetry etc
- ranger_danger 2y ago> Why should users opt in to a feature if they perceive it has no value to them There will be users that perceive any feature of the application to have no value. I think developers should not only consider the opinions and wishes of the user but also what's best for the application itself.
- matheusmoreira 2y agoWhether anyone will use it or not doesn't matter. They do things like this, they simply show everyone they can't be trusted.
- entuno 2y agoThere are plenty of opt-in features that people do use. Hell, the entire extension ecosystem is based around people choosing to opt in to various extra features. So if this is something that is so undesirable that no one would opt it to it, then maybe it's not a feature that should be included the the browser at all - especially when Mozilla's slogan is "Internet for people, not profit".
- chefandy 2y agoI wonder if they snagged themselves one of those executives that justifies ignoring privacy by insisting people really do want targeted ads more than privacy... so you really really don't even need to inform them about it or give them a choice.
- chefandy 2y agoI enable debugging telemetry when I encounter bugs, but I'm not going to constantly send some company a shitload of my usage metadata just in case it's useful at some point.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago"Not taking sides here" but taking sides here.
- alserio 2y agoyou can just ask then
- Hamuko 2y agoFirefox is an opt-in feature on all of my devices.
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoCounterpoint: Syncthing's telemetry is strictly opt-in, and > 100,000 people have opted in. It's possible to collect useful data in a way that also respects your users. Many projects do so. Firefox just chooses not to. https://data.syncthing.net/ https://data.syncthing.net/
- ranger_danger 2y agoInteresting... I wonder how many other projects have had similar success, this is the first time I've heard about an opt-in number that large. I'd be interested to know what their UX for it is and if they did any research on it.
- account42 2y agoAnother example is Debian popcon [0] with over 234k opt-in users. [0] https://popcon.debian.org/ https://popcon.debian.org/
- entuno 2y agoDisappointing behaviour by Mozilla, but not hugely surprising. It's also rather suspicious that the setting to disable this seems to be somewhat hidden. If I go to settings and search for "advertising" then I get: > Sorry! There are no results in Settings for "advertising". But if I browse to it manually in then the setting is there, in the section named "Website Advertising Preferences". And the search definitely includes section titles, because if I search for "collection" then it shows that section of the Privacy & Security settings, with a highlight on the text on the title.
- client4 2y agoIn a few years, when Ladybird is stable and largely feature complete, Mozilla will act incredibly confused as to why they are losing market share. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- KingOfCoders 2y ago30+ years Firefox user, eager for Ladybird to be usable on Windows.
- guilamu 2y agoWon't happen anytime soon : " Will Ladybird work on Windows? We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment. "
- RedShift1 2y agoTargeting the smallest market first seems like a good recipe for a project to die early
- sulandor 2y agoit's not a commercial product
- prox 2y agoWhich is not the point. If you want to have success you need to copy the Blender/Godot model. Year by year they make great versions for all platforms, and they do well. A new browser should support both and rally the people to work on it, again like the Blender Foundation has done.
- master-lincoln 2y ago
- reify 2y agohttps://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42687 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- frabcus 2y agoI'd love a detailed description of the politics and economics of adding this. Why are Firefox doing it, how does it relate to similar features in other browsers? If it leads to direct revenue, how? If there are relationship reasons for doing it, what are the forces at play? Just the actual background, not opinions on whether it is good or bad before understanding that background.
- justinclift 2y agoBearing in mind that Mozilla literally bought an advertising company recently too.
- matt3210 2y agoConsent is opt in, yes means yes
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y agoWasn't the a HN post a couple of weeks ago claiming that mozilla was now an advertising company? It seems almost that mozilla's leadership is intentionally trying to ruin it.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoSince decades, marketshare is down down down, >$6.000.000.000 squandered.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoThey think they can make money by pushing this and owning (parts of) the infrastructure to transfer the reports of PPA. Not long and we'll see the same game as Chrome + ad blockers.
- Kwpolska 2y agoIt is an attempt to replace more invasive tracking techniques. The AdTech industry is unlikely to give up on knowing which ads were "successful". A privacy-friendly solution developed by Firefox is miles better than something invented by Google, the AdTech company masquerading as a browser vendor.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoIt is an attempt by Firefox to earn money from the AdTech industry. I use an adblocker, I have no need for "Privacy preserving ads".
- frabcus 2y agoHow will it help them earn money? Are Google threatening them with withdrawal of search revenue unless they add the feature? Something else?
- Yeri 2y agoFirefox is in the ads business now: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
- frabcus 2y agoInteresting thanks! Anonyms technology is presumably what the original article was about? Any idea what a transaction will look like. Who will pay them for this and how? I guess ad networks would pay so they can still attribute and do retain their customers better? I wonder what the fee is per
- rwmj 2y agoIf only they'd saved the Google money into a trust rather than spaffing it on senior management.
- 2y ago
- TekMol 2y agoThe gist of it seems to be that Mozilla and ISRG now proxy the tracking data and give aggregated reports to advertisers. And that they handle the data in a way so that neither Mozilla nor ISRG alone can access the unaggregated data. From reading around their documents ... https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/ https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/ ... it sounds a bit like they route the data through something like an onion network. So nodes in the network do not know what data they are routing and the advertisers get aggregated data without knowing who the users were: ... our DAP service, which is a Multiparty Compute (MPC) system based on Prio ... And the "Multiparty" seems to be these two: Our DAP deployment is jointly run by Mozilla and ISRG. Privacy is lost if the two organizations collude I think this is actually an interesting approach. I don't know whether two parties are enough and whether the specific algorithm used is good. But if it works as advertised (haha), it would result in measuring ad effectiveness without compromising user privacy. Which might be a good thing.
- arresin 2y ago> But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them. Could this advertiser be Google who also pays their salary?
- amelius 2y agoI don't get why the EU isn't paying their salary, frankly.
- bad_user 2y agoBecause the EU isn't a charity or a socialist union. And if EU ever wants to fund a browser, as an EU taxpayer I'd like the organization, with its employees, to be EU-based.
- account42 2y agoIt is however in the EU's interest to have a mainstream browser that is not controlled by a US megacorporation. And yes, it would make more sense for them to pay local devs rather than invest in silicon valley but Mozilla could also move and/or expand if they wanted.
- tgv 2y agoThat is very disappointing, indeed. "[A]nnounced with very little fanfare" is an understatement. It is mentioned as an afterthought on the page with new features, without the screen-shots that are shown for the other configurable features, and couched in soothing language: they call it "privacy preserving". It's almost “But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.” (https://www.planetclaire.tv/quotes/hitchhikers/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy/ https://www.planetclaire.tv/quotes/hitchhikers/the-hitchhike...) You do this when you want to hide something. This does not inspire trust. Edit: instead, if they believe this to be a way out of the ongoing data thievery that is the ad industry, they could have announced this openly and boldly. "You want privacy, they want ads, here's a middle-ground." It could have been scrutinized by members of the community beforehand. Now, it'll just tarnish the reputation of Firefox and go down with it.
- ta15784575 2y agoIt's a bit surreal seeing it tbh, but knowing that Google keeps them afloat makes it make sense. A sad day to see Mozilla go down like this.
- thomassmith65 2y agoI assume Waterfox (http://waterfox.net http://waterfox.net) won't adopt this garbage feature.
- worksonmine 2y agoConfirmed the new setting was on for me. Mozilla is really starting to test my patience. Do I have to check the settings every time I update my browser now?
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoMozilla have been doing that trick for a while. When they wanted to push Pocket, if you removed the toolbar button (they disabled removal of the add-on) they added it back in on the next update. Hard to see their repeated reversion of specific controversial user settings as accidental.
- ajb 2y agoRight, so there is a genuine moral case for Mozilla doing this. It depends why you hate ads: A: the main problem with ads is tracking and privacy invasion B: the main problem with ads is manipulation and seizure of my attention If you only care about A, you might like this approach, as in principle if it works and becomes standard, then the pressure from the ad industry to track everything will be easier to resist, as 1) they will have less incentive, and 2) the argument that tracking is essential is undermined, so it may be possible eventually to ban it. Of course, that assumes that you trust that this is better for your privacy than tracking. After all, it does feel a bit like tracking... If it's done properly then your individual data is not sprayed to a thousand dodgy ad brokers, but only to one company who tells advertisers not about you personally, but just whether their ad is working. The question is, does it work? Are they doing it properly? Do they have the correct incentives to keep doing it properly in the long term? Can advertisers just undermine it by giving everyone's ads a different ID? Also, your threat model may include that this aggregator company is hacked, or that the government secretly forces it to share the data with them. Nevertheless, I think that Mozilla probably genuinely think this is better for privacy. And there is a case that there is. A big issue however its that at present the constituency for Firefox includes people who care about B. This doesn't undermine that directly, but it does mean that Mozilla have an incentive not to care about it.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoC. the main problem _is_ ads Mozilla assumes ads are required. Ad blockers assume ads are not required. Ad blockers are probably more popular than Firefox. The original web did not have targeted ads and did not require ads to exist. It has never faced an existential threat due to "not enough data collection and targeted advertising". Ad blockers are correct.
- immibis 2y agoMozilla is an ad company by its revenue sources.
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
- jankovicsandras 2y agoIs this illegal in GDPR countries (EU + Norway + ...) or am I reading GDPR wrong? "If informed consent is used as the lawful basis for processing, consent must have been explicit for data collected and each purpose data is used for" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdpr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdpr
- Signez 2y agoThere is no personal data collected as it's one of the key feature of that process, so in my humble opinion it's out of the scope of GDPR.
- jankovicsandras 2y ago"Controller and processor Data controllers must clearly disclose any data collection, declare the lawful basis and purpose for data processing, and state how long data is being retained and if it is being shared with any third parties or outside of the EEA." I don't see the word "personal" in this sentence, only "any data collection". It's clearly not in the users' interest/benefit to activate this data collection, and not required for the normal functioning of the browser/websites. So activating this silently is minimum _very unethical_ and probably illegal, but I'm not a lawyer.
- tgvaughan 2y agoDoes anybody know whether this also applies to firefox android?
- jampekka 2y agoAt least to Beta. Not sure about the release version because it doesn't have about:flags. Probably it's infested with it too, and it's unclear how to disable it. I fucking hate this.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Digit-Al 2y agoI really don't see anything wrong with this, personally. It's a limited test with a small number of websites involved. Only aggregate data is received, so all they'll know is something like "x number of people saw this ad and y number of people clicked on it"; no other information about those users. Seems very innocuous to me. As to it being opt out instead of opt in: consider the fact that only a small number of websites are involved in the experiment; if it was opt in then it seems quite likely that there could potentially be no intersection between users who opt in and users who visit those specific websites, rendering the entire experiment pointless. [Edit: fixed spelling error]
- throwawa14223 2y agoAm I wrong that it is only aggregate to the advertisers and not aggregate to the ISRG? I feel pretty negative about the ISRG having my data to provide aggregate data from.
- jampekka 2y agoThis is how users are turned into products.
- from-nibly 2y agoYou are the product. Firefox is not the exception. Unless they wholly operate on donations from users, then the users are the product.
- ta15784575 2y agoFair enough, but a decent heads up would've been nice. Scumbags.
- npteljes 2y agoDonations and paying for things doesn't change this. Often, providers can just double-dip, and sell the service or product, and then have channels for advertising as well. But I do agree that it's a string of bad news for Firefox users over the years.
- singularity2001 2y agoTangential: How do some sites manage to open other sites in new tabs without confirmation in 2024? Popups need explicit confirmation since 200x??
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- oijkuyih 2y ago[flagged]
- throwawa14223 2y agoHas anyone here been the victim of this and can look up what IP addresses and domain names need to be added to blocklists?
- bravetraveler 2y agoI don't negotiate with advertisers, the most privacy-respecting option is to block/starve them.
- bravetraveler 2y agoI can't edit now but a point to add: they're adversarial in their persistence, this response isn't from nothing
- logicprog 2y agoOnce again, I have to stick my ore in here and chill for LibreWolf :D I think it might really be worth checking out for people like me that prefer the user interface and functionality of Firefox over chromium and don't want to contribute to the blink engine monopoly, but also often doesn't approve of what Mozilla is doing upstream and wants someone to shield them from it. It's my daily drive for browser for basically everything, and 99% of the time, even on stuff that you would think wouldn't work, it works just fine. I keep chromium in my back pocket just in case, but I've only had to pull chromium out like twice in the past year, once for something that required the USB-HID protocol and once for iCloud. And yes, for those of you on distributions, you might say that your distribution maintainers will just patch out or customize out, and the nefarious changes that Mozilla makes upstream. But the thing you have to remember is that distribution maintainers are handling, by a whole lot of other things, tens of thousands of other packages, and an entire operating system, and its upkeep, go through them. So they will often just not patch out or patch things out inconsistently or not really pay attention. I think it's much better to rely on a project whose whole purpose and explicit mission is making Mozilla more privacy-friendly and secure and who have a dedicated community of a few developers consistently working on it. Especially since distribution maintainers don't really make any specific mission statement promises with regards to specific packages, but something like LW does. It does a lot more than just this one thing. It's essentially equivalent to having a arkenfox config maintained for you and always applied to your browser and updated in lockstep with your browser, as well as a set of patches that they maintain to remove things like Pocket.
- ghostwords 2y agoDismantle systems of online surveillance. Limit online advertising to contextual ads, and to the same attribution methods advertisers have access to with traditional (TV, print and billboard) ads. Is your browser a user agent or an advertiser agent?
- stiltzkin 2y agoThen she suggests Google Chrome. Just switch to Librewolf.
- t0bia_s 2y agoBetter to use more privacy friendly LibreWolf, fork of Firefox.
- nunez 2y agoThis is FLoC-style adtech, right? Really scummy of them to make it opt-out.