4 ms·
But *what's in it for the user?* - "in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasur
by perihelions 2y ago
But *what's in it for the user?*
- "in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win"
It's in the user's interest to attempt to appease the spammers? It's in the user's interest to voluntarily hand over some personal, private information about themselves, to commercial stalkers, in hopes that–what–satiates the data harvesters?
Is this Mozilla's position?
- Dalewyn 2y agoMozilla themselves siphon telemetry (eg: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org), they're at best a faux defender of privacy. Seriously, they don't deserve peoples' support.
- squigz 2y agoWhat's wrong with telemetry?
- msla 2y agoIt is a violation of privacy.
- squigz 2y agoHow so?
- basscomm 2y agoBecause once I get a product from a vendor, it's none of the vendor's business how I use the product unless I want to tell them about it. Software vendors seem to think that they're entitled to this information because they really want it, but they're wrong.
- exsomet 2y ago> Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment for monitoring. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry Telemetry’s incompatibility with privacy is self-evident.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoWell, they’ve been trying to fight the advertisers for, oh, 2 decades now; and the advertisers have basically won every fight repeatedly. This is combined with Firefox market share declining to the point that if they do not at least somewhat placate the advertisers, the advertisers could simply block Firefox en-masse and survive. Time for a new strategy.
- roblabla 2y ago> the advertisers could simply block Firefox en-masse and survive And why would firefox users care about advertisers blocking firefox? Oh noes, ads aren’t showing up in my browser!
- squigz 2y agoI think Firefox users would care if they suddenly couldn't access a large part of the Internet on Firefox.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoBelieve me, the advertisers are probably watching the whole Manifest v3 rollout in Chrome very closely; and weighing the odds that, if they block Firefox, they’ll be able to kill it off completely and have ads for everyone.
- account42 2y agoWhy would websites bother with an arms race to block a browser barely anyone uses?
- ZhongXina 2y agoWhich two decades? They haven't even began trying to fight advertisers. There are a few browsers with aggressive ad blocker shipped out of the box; Firefox is not one of them.
- account42 2y ago> Well, they’ve been trying to fight the advertisers for, oh, 2 decades now; and the advertisers have basically won every fight repeatedly. Who has been fighting the advertisers? Mozilla? No, they haven't even included a basic ad blocker with FF, only some lackluster "tracking protection" that barely anyone is going to enable (while implementing whatever new privacy leaks Google proposes). If the advertisers have won any fights it is only because Mozilla hasn't even bothered to show up.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoYes. They're just surrendering.
- ineptech 2y agoI don't think this is fair. It's not like we have great privacy now, and Mozilla is in danger of giving it away; advertisers already fingerprint your browser and tie your traffic back to a real-world identity today. I don't think PPA would help them do that any better at all. Mozilla's position is, instead of the arms race to hide/identify traffic, if the browser builds in a way to measure conversions that doesn't rely giving up your identity then advertisers have less need of getting at your identity through other means. (And they haven't said this, but I assume the next step is, if advertisers can measure conversions then it becomes easier to envision legal countermeasures in the form of regulation)