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"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id

by _lvbh 2y ago

"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535

mrguyorama 2y ago
If you read the information about that feature, it is about ad attribution. A website can ask your browser "Did you see these ads" and Firefox will send the result to a 3rd party. That 3rd party periodically reports a summary of ad conversion results to the ad buyer, supposedly with "noise" to provide "differential privacy". Probably some way to to glean some info, but that is absolutely not what people are claiming it is. Meanwhile you all still use Chrome so what's your complaint?
- codedokode 2y ago
  This is not ok. Browser should help to block ads, not to help display it more efficiently.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    This feature does nothing to prevent you from blocking ads entirely, and Mozilla has not signaled that they intend to destroy the ability of extensions like ublock to run arbitrary code to decide what to block in the way that Google and the Chrome team have explicitly said they will do. This feature does nothing more than allow advertisers a very basic form of "fifty percent of people who you showed these ads to interacted with them" in a way that doesn't require things like third party cookies. I'm not convinced that it will go anywhere, as Google and Facebook, the majority of the online advertising market, do not want to give up the powers they have currently for attribution that are also great at powerful tracking, and as you show, the public will continue to play word games about how Firefox is "destroying privacy" while continuing to mostly use AND DEVELOP FOR chrome. Or worse, a version of chrome that they pretend is somehow not entirely controlled by google. If you want to block ads, Firefox is still the obvious browser choice over anything that branches off of Chrome. Firefox will NEVER possibly be pure enough for the people who still for whatever reason just use chrome. It's insanity.

by _lvbh 2y ago

"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535

mrguyorama 2y ago

If you read the information about that feature, it is about ad attribution. A website can ask your browser "Did you see these ads" and Firefox will send the result to a 3rd party. That 3rd party periodically reports a summary of ad conversion results to the ad buyer, supposedly with "noise" to provide "differential privacy". Probably some way to to glean some info, but that is absolutely not what people are claiming it is. Meanwhile you all still use Chrome so what's your complaint?

codedokode 2y ago
This is not ok. Browser should help to block ads, not to help display it more efficiently.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  This feature does nothing to prevent you from blocking ads entirely, and Mozilla has not signaled that they intend to destroy the ability of extensions like ublock to run arbitrary code to decide what to block in the way that Google and the Chrome team have explicitly said they will do. This feature does nothing more than allow advertisers a very basic form of "fifty percent of people who you showed these ads to interacted with them" in a way that doesn't require things like third party cookies. I'm not convinced that it will go anywhere, as Google and Facebook, the majority of the online advertising market, do not want to give up the powers they have currently for attribution that are also great at powerful tracking, and as you show, the public will continue to play word games about how Firefox is "destroying privacy" while continuing to mostly use AND DEVELOP FOR chrome. Or worse, a version of chrome that they pretend is somehow not entirely controlled by google. If you want to block ads, Firefox is still the obvious browser choice over anything that branches off of Chrome. Firefox will NEVER possibly be pure enough for the people who still for whatever reason just use chrome. It's insanity.