8 ms·

Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature

156 points by robin_reala 2y ago

rawling 2y ago
Some previous discussion (on Moz making this on-by-default): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330
tinnyx 2y ago
A relevant article from July with information how to disable the "feature": https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/#disabling-ppa https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di... Personally I've been using FF for the last 4 years even though I consider it a worse experience, but I'm becoming disilusioned with it and considering moving to LibreWolf. I'm also interested in trying Orion (by Kagi), but haven't had the time yet.
- neobrain 2y ago
  FTR the feature is also implicitly disabled if you have telemetry disabled. I wish more privacy advocate websites mentioned this. Not sure what these one-sided stories achieve other than pushing "might as well use Chrome then" conspiracies.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  Orion is neat but you're going to loose a lot of extension support. Librewolf on the other hand is 99% Firefox, for the better (extension) and for the worst (clunkiness). I've been down this road, honestly just stick with Firefox and disable the relevant setting. It's not worth the time.
  - wobfan 2y ago
    Tbh. I don't get the negatives about Firefox. I have to use Chrome for App development and have been using it a little more in the last months. I cannot see why I should prefer it over Firefox. It works well, has (or soon used to have) good extension support and is smooth, but so is Firefox. Like, I could not say one single thing that I prefer in Chrome. And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.
    - ddfs123 2y ago
      Google Meet, Slack Web, for example, are notirious for being Firefox-hostile. Though I manage fine with User-Agent
      - wobfan 2y ago
        Slack works fine afaik, have been using it for a few years, but I can imagine Meet not working. I remember having switch to chrome for that.
        ddfs123 2y ago
        Slack's huddle just straight up block Firefox for me ( 130.0.1, Fedora ).
      - saratogacx 2y ago
        Google meet on FF used to be almost a no-op but for the past year or so it has operated without any real issue. Screen sharing is sometimes off when iterating windows but that is pretty minor. (on Windows anyway)
        ddfs123 2y ago
        I got some message like "XML error" and just denied out of meeting lots of time.
    - aucisson_masque 2y ago
      Personally it's more about the user interface. Searching history for instance is a mess on Firefox, you got it in collection tab and in history menu. Then if you click on yesterday, it won't sort by the hour at which I browsed it yesterday but at the most recent date so that the sort order is messed up with the stuff you browsed today, and so on, and so on. You say you're a developer. I had to tweak my company website myself, not knowing anything about css, html, JavaScript, chrome developer tools were intuitive enough. Firefox developer tools? even years later, now than I understand well website development, I often still can't figure out how to do stuff.
- wobfan 2y ago
  Tried it for some days, on iOS and macOS. It still has bugs, and extensions don't work as good as they should. Sometimes they don't work at all. The UI is a a little buggy, but that's acceptable. Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  I used Firefox long ago, before I switched to Mac. Because of crippling defects in Safari (pages just not loading, hyperlinks not being recognized as such, clicks doing nothing), I decided to go back to Firefox. This was made feasible by the availability of a bookmark-syncing facility across devices. But... wow it's painful. On mobile, the bookmarks are buried under layers of inexplicable and unneeded menus. It's infuriating to use. On the desktop, the storage of log-in credentials is only half done. It'll remember what user ID you might have used for a site, but it then fails to select the password associated with that ID. It just presents a giant list of every password for every ID you might have used on the site. You have to scroll through them all, and sometimes there are duplicates. Why? Then there's the inability to specify that new tabs should open on your home page. Instead, new tabs have to open on the Mozilla home page, which presents a search bar that's useless. When you start typing in it, a giant search panel erupts from the top of the screen and the cursor jumps into it. WTF? Who thought that was good design? I will probably just go back to Safari, because I refuse to support Google's shit. But what's going on with Firefox? They're putting dev time into the garbage reported in this article, and ignoring glaring defects that are driving Firefox's already tiny market share away.
  - pmontra 2y ago
    That depends on the usage pattern. To give you a totally different way to use Firefox: I use it both on desktop (Linux) and on mobile (Android, multiple devices.) I don't ever close it. I close it to update or to reboot my computer. On desktop it's configured to restart with the previously opened tabs and windows (one per customer, each one on its virtual desktop, one for me.) I don't sync tabs because way more than half of the tabs on my desktop Firefox are related to work, some localhost, some reachable only on a VPN. Furthermore it's no business of Mozilla or anybody else to see my tabs go through their servers, E2E encryption or not. I never used any browser internal password manager because (any other considerations apart) what happens when I want to access a site from another browser? Maybe from Chrome, and I used Opera and Vivaldi as secondary browsers many years ago. I store my passwords in one of the various Keepass apps, sync from desktop to mobile with syncthing and I'm happy. Firefox as browser-only browser is perfectly good for me. The surrounding UI is almost transparent to me, as if it did not exist. The only point of contact between your and mine experiences are the bookmarks on mobile. I don't use them. I pin the sites I use most on the page that opens when pressing the new tab button and those are my bookmarks. Unfortunately there are only 16 possible pinned sites there but I'm not even using all of them. Most of the times I tap the URL bar, type one or two letters and Firefox autocompletes the sites I want to see. Example: I tap n and it suggests news.ycombinator.com. Faster than any bookmarks menu. Anyway. If most users follow your workflow, Mozilla are not doing a good job. If most users follow my workflow, they are wasting a lot of engineering time in features we don't use. IMHO Firefox users are mostly power users so I think there are at least ten different workflows competing for the top spot and whatever Mozilla does people will be mostly upset. It's not an easy place to be.
- bugtodiffer 2y ago
  I'd not use Orion. They can barely build a working search engine, I don't trust them one bit to code a secure browser
mort96 2y ago
It's unfortunate how all the browsers are in cahoots with the ad industry.
- dbtc 2y ago
  And you must use a Modern Corporate Browser to access Essential Workplace Applications.
- seb1204 2y ago
  Is Mozilla still receiving money from Google for making Google search the default?
  - rpastuszak 2y ago
    Both Mozilla and Apple: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume-consent/#h-dollar510000000 https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
- youngtaff 2y ago
  Chrome is literally owned by an Ad company
  - mort96 2y ago
    Yeah Google is the world's largest ad company, and Apple is (among other things) an ad company, and Mozilla just recently acquired an ad tracking/analytics company...
garte 2y ago
I guess there are bigger considerations at work here. Like where the money's coming from that fuels Firefox development. Still using it though.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  Yep, despite the best intentions, once you have a funding stream it can become a controlling force on the overall direction of a project. The alternative is to either have the user pay for it or have little to no funding which is a dead end in its own fashion.
Lio 2y ago
The most annoying aspect of this is how Mozilla have tried to sneak it in without telling anyone. By not being up front they’ve joined the users are just product crew.
- neobrain 2y ago
  This is a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature: https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/lddsaai/ https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_p... (Note that additionally when this post was written, the feature did not even truly do anything. It was running on an empty allow-list: https://mastodon.social/@jamesh@aus.social/112834742534943109 https://mastodon.social/@jamesh@aus.social/11283474253494310...)
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature You're correct: Mozilla didn't try to hide this. But they didn't try to talk about it either. This isn't an obscure about:config setting; it's a new revenue source [1]. [1] 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...
  - Lio 2y ago
    Then where is the setting in the normal privacy preferences to turn it off? Instead it's been sneaked in behind a magic about:config URL and dialogue box saying: > Proceed with Caution > Changing advanced configuration preferences can impact Firefox performance or security. At the very least that is designed to discourage you from opting out.
    - neobrain 2y ago
      This is also false. Where are you pulling this from? There is a user-visible setting in the normal preferences. It's grayed out unless you have telemetry enabled. I think the initial version they shipped PPA in had no such option because, again, the feature didn't actually do anything at the time (and I'm not sure they expanded the allow list yet either).
weare138 2y ago
It's become painfully obvious Mozilla has abandon Firefox and are just exploiting what's left of it's reputation for profit. It time to fork Firefox and kick Mozilla to the curb.
- zihotki 2y ago
  There are already a plenty of forks. We need another player on the field. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ looks very promising.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    Yes hopefully ladybird is the final nail in Mozillas coffin and the ladybird team shows that you don't need >$6.000.000.000 to build a proper browser. (written in Firefox)
  - bugtodiffer 2y ago
    It's promising but like 10 years behind chromium
  - youngtaff 2y ago
    Nah, not using Ladybird as I don’t want to support the person building it for various reasons
    - stephantul 2y ago
      Can you give more info?
  - d1sxeyes 2y ago
    First alpha in 2026…
  - weare138 2y ago
    Ladybird does look really cool but what I mean is an alternative to the Mozilla Foundation as an official steward of what should be Firefox. Basically what Mozilla was originally created to do but obviously isn't anymore. They're just exploiting Firefox's users now. How much of what Mozilla brings in is actually going to improving Firefox? Google, the maker of the largest competitor in he browser market, has been paying off Mozilla's leadership to not compete in the browser market for like a decade now. Go research how much the c-suite was making over there at Mozilla while they were gutting the Firefox dev teams. And now Mozilla is straight up data mining Firefox's users. They obviously don't care what the users of Firefox think anymore because no one in the community asked for any of this crap. I don't think this needs to be explained to anyone here but modern web browsers are complicated as hell. We need viable open-source browsers but we also need a way to fund their development. Again what Mozilla was intended for. Hell it doesn't even need to be centered around Firefox specifically but we need some viable alternative to manage and fund these vital open-source projects.
cjpearson 2y ago
It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature. If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Yes, on an individual level you can mostly opt-out of this surveillance nightmare by using pi hole, uBlock origin, AdGuard etc. I do so myself. But keep in mind that this solution only works because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing. They deserve privacy too. So I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Why would an ad company ever use this instead of tracking users? Even if it exceeded <5% of users (or whatever Firefox has these days), why not just keep tracking and add this one more data point? It's a little like how "if you aren't paying, you're the product" turned into "if you pay, you're still the product".
  - adjfasn47573 2y ago
    This. I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this. As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point. So it's worth nothing.
  - izacus 2y ago
    Because it's easier and because it makes it impossible to make a case for any other kind of tracking under laws like GDPR once this exists.
    - dietr1ch 2y ago
CalRobert 2y ago
With wei/attestation and every site I go to begging me to log in with Google (and only Google) just to use it, it’s clear anonymous browsing will be dead soon.
falqun 2y ago
Hm, not sure if I did something against that already, but for me the option in about:preferences was unchecked and also I am unable to check it. I am not sure why that is, anyone has an idea?
- evilpie 2y ago
  If it's disabled (greyed-out), then you already have telemetry disabled.
- bugtodiffer 2y ago
  Because this went viral a few times now
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Eriks 2y ago
Set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false in about:config and problem solved. Not the first thing you should disable there and not the last.
ManBeardPc 2y ago
Opt-out is simply a violation of the EU GDPR. For me as an EU citizen it was checked after the update. I hope the data protection agencies have the capacity to punish this behavior, sadly a lot of bad actors still get away because there aren’t enough resources.
- rawling 2y ago
  Per Mozilla > The technology aims to demonstrate a way for advertisers to measure overall ad effectiveness without gathering information about specific individuals. If it doesn't collect personal data, does it fall under GDPR?
  - d1sxeyes 2y ago
    No. But the bar for “personal data” is very low, and any data that could conceivably be linked to an individual is personal data. I’m not familiar with how this function works, but Mozilla would almost certainly have to work quite hard to avoid falling foul of this: > ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
  - ManBeardPc 2y ago
    It contains data about which ads you saw or clicked on as a histogram. GDPR defines personal data as follows: > The basic definition of personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject). This data is then aggregated using their DAP service. This means to a third party. They say it's somehow encrypted and will be fully anonymized, but I can't fully understand the implementation. There are several security considerations mentioned in the draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/. Doesn't matter that much, they have to ask for consent and inform the user in clear and understandable language anyway. Opt-out is a big no-no.
Argonaut998 2y ago
I’ve gone back to Brave. I really want to support a non-Chromium engine but Firefox have constantly slyly added features for its entire history. You need only open about:config and search for “telemetry” as an example. I honestly don’t know why people always rush to Firefox’s defense when their track record is as bad as Brave’s. The amount of hoops I have to jump through to get a private Firefox after installing it is significant. Even their latest update the other day re-enabled search recommendations.
wkat4242 2y ago
What's worse: The opt-out option is not even present in the mobile firefox app.
- zaik 2y ago
  Is this feature enabled on the mobile app?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    I wouldn't call it a "feature" but I'm not sure. Their announcement didn't mention either way (that it was everywhere or desktop only) The settings are present in about:config though (which is difficult to access on mobile also because they hide it). Hopefully they will abandon this plan anyway due to all the criticism. It won't do any good unless google is on board anyway.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  The functionality isn’t enabled in Firefox for Android. The justification is specifically that there’s no opt out available. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1909729#c5 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1909729#c5
talkin 2y ago
All posts like these, and all comments here up till now just don’t mention the Real Solution: Allow ads, forbid user targeted ads. If a site can not exist based on that instead of the current ads ‘needing 1337 partners’, tough luck. Also: maybe if targetting isnt allowed anymore, the value of the normal ads might increase a bit.
- tzs 2y ago
  The Firefox feature under discussion, PPA, has nothing to do with targeting. It's about attribution. It comes into play after you have seen an ad. If you later go visit the site the ad was promoting, it increments a counter maintained by Mozilla or by some company hired by Mozilla. Later the site the ad was for gets a report telling them something like that out of N people who saw the ad, M of those people later visited the site.
  - talkin 2y ago
    Thanks for the clear words. :) But that still means both can go hand in hand! If user targeted ads and tracking is forbidden and a thing from the past, there’ll be less problems with having some proper statistical attribution. Hint: I’m from the EU and love the intention behind GDPR.
multimoon 2y ago
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but I was a chrome user for well over a decade. I spent the last year or so trying to switch to Firefox (and did) because google implemented something similar to this in chrome. I used it for a year and then I switched back to chrome about 3mo ago because the writing was on the wall that Mozilla was going down the same route, just more slowly and a few years behind. I don’t see a reason to use Firefox if it’s going to have the same “features” that I just have disable in chrome, when chrome is still more performant. It’s really unfortunate that every alternative to chrome is either measurably slower or just a fork of chrome.

156 points by robin_reala 2y ago

Some previous discussion (on Moz making this on-by-default): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330

tinnyx 2y ago

A relevant article from July with information how to disable the "feature": https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/#disabling-ppa https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di... Personally I've been using FF for the last 4 years even though I consider it a worse experience, but I'm becoming disilusioned with it and considering moving to LibreWolf. I'm also interested in trying Orion (by Kagi), but haven't had the time yet.

neobrain 2y ago
FTR the feature is also implicitly disabled if you have telemetry disabled. I wish more privacy advocate websites mentioned this. Not sure what these one-sided stories achieve other than pushing "might as well use Chrome then" conspiracies.
aucisson_masque 2y ago
Orion is neat but you're going to loose a lot of extension support. Librewolf on the other hand is 99% Firefox, for the better (extension) and for the worst (clunkiness). I've been down this road, honestly just stick with Firefox and disable the relevant setting. It's not worth the time.
- wobfan 2y ago
  Tbh. I don't get the negatives about Firefox. I have to use Chrome for App development and have been using it a little more in the last months. I cannot see why I should prefer it over Firefox. It works well, has (or soon used to have) good extension support and is smooth, but so is Firefox. Like, I could not say one single thing that I prefer in Chrome. And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.
  - ddfs123 2y ago
    Google Meet, Slack Web, for example, are notirious for being Firefox-hostile. Though I manage fine with User-Agent
    - wobfan 2y ago
      Slack works fine afaik, have been using it for a few years, but I can imagine Meet not working. I remember having switch to chrome for that.
      - ddfs123 2y ago
        Slack's huddle just straight up block Firefox for me ( 130.0.1, Fedora ).
    - saratogacx 2y ago
      Google meet on FF used to be almost a no-op but for the past year or so it has operated without any real issue. Screen sharing is sometimes off when iterating windows but that is pretty minor. (on Windows anyway)
      - ddfs123 2y ago
        I got some message like "XML error" and just denied out of meeting lots of time.
  - aucisson_masque 2y ago
    Personally it's more about the user interface. Searching history for instance is a mess on Firefox, you got it in collection tab and in history menu. Then if you click on yesterday, it won't sort by the hour at which I browsed it yesterday but at the most recent date so that the sort order is messed up with the stuff you browsed today, and so on, and so on. You say you're a developer. I had to tweak my company website myself, not knowing anything about css, html, JavaScript, chrome developer tools were intuitive enough. Firefox developer tools? even years later, now than I understand well website development, I often still can't figure out how to do stuff.
wobfan 2y ago
Tried it for some days, on iOS and macOS. It still has bugs, and extensions don't work as good as they should. Sometimes they don't work at all. The UI is a a little buggy, but that's acceptable. Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
I used Firefox long ago, before I switched to Mac. Because of crippling defects in Safari (pages just not loading, hyperlinks not being recognized as such, clicks doing nothing), I decided to go back to Firefox. This was made feasible by the availability of a bookmark-syncing facility across devices. But... wow it's painful. On mobile, the bookmarks are buried under layers of inexplicable and unneeded menus. It's infuriating to use. On the desktop, the storage of log-in credentials is only half done. It'll remember what user ID you might have used for a site, but it then fails to select the password associated with that ID. It just presents a giant list of every password for every ID you might have used on the site. You have to scroll through them all, and sometimes there are duplicates. Why? Then there's the inability to specify that new tabs should open on your home page. Instead, new tabs have to open on the Mozilla home page, which presents a search bar that's useless. When you start typing in it, a giant search panel erupts from the top of the screen and the cursor jumps into it. WTF? Who thought that was good design? I will probably just go back to Safari, because I refuse to support Google's shit. But what's going on with Firefox? They're putting dev time into the garbage reported in this article, and ignoring glaring defects that are driving Firefox's already tiny market share away.
- pmontra 2y ago
  That depends on the usage pattern. To give you a totally different way to use Firefox: I use it both on desktop (Linux) and on mobile (Android, multiple devices.) I don't ever close it. I close it to update or to reboot my computer. On desktop it's configured to restart with the previously opened tabs and windows (one per customer, each one on its virtual desktop, one for me.) I don't sync tabs because way more than half of the tabs on my desktop Firefox are related to work, some localhost, some reachable only on a VPN. Furthermore it's no business of Mozilla or anybody else to see my tabs go through their servers, E2E encryption or not. I never used any browser internal password manager because (any other considerations apart) what happens when I want to access a site from another browser? Maybe from Chrome, and I used Opera and Vivaldi as secondary browsers many years ago. I store my passwords in one of the various Keepass apps, sync from desktop to mobile with syncthing and I'm happy. Firefox as browser-only browser is perfectly good for me. The surrounding UI is almost transparent to me, as if it did not exist. The only point of contact between your and mine experiences are the bookmarks on mobile. I don't use them. I pin the sites I use most on the page that opens when pressing the new tab button and those are my bookmarks. Unfortunately there are only 16 possible pinned sites there but I'm not even using all of them. Most of the times I tap the URL bar, type one or two letters and Firefox autocompletes the sites I want to see. Example: I tap n and it suggests news.ycombinator.com. Faster than any bookmarks menu. Anyway. If most users follow your workflow, Mozilla are not doing a good job. If most users follow my workflow, they are wasting a lot of engineering time in features we don't use. IMHO Firefox users are mostly power users so I think there are at least ten different workflows competing for the top spot and whatever Mozilla does people will be mostly upset. It's not an easy place to be.
bugtodiffer 2y ago
I'd not use Orion. They can barely build a working search engine, I don't trust them one bit to code a secure browser

mort96 2y ago

It's unfortunate how all the browsers are in cahoots with the ad industry.

dbtc 2y ago
And you must use a Modern Corporate Browser to access Essential Workplace Applications.
seb1204 2y ago
Is Mozilla still receiving money from Google for making Google search the default?
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  Both Mozilla and Apple: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume-consent/#h-dollar510000000 https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
youngtaff 2y ago
Chrome is literally owned by an Ad company
- mort96 2y ago
  Yeah Google is the world's largest ad company, and Apple is (among other things) an ad company, and Mozilla just recently acquired an ad tracking/analytics company...

garte 2y ago

I guess there are bigger considerations at work here. Like where the money's coming from that fuels Firefox development. Still using it though.

DaoVeles 2y ago
Yep, despite the best intentions, once you have a funding stream it can become a controlling force on the overall direction of a project. The alternative is to either have the user pay for it or have little to no funding which is a dead end in its own fashion.

Lio 2y ago

The most annoying aspect of this is how Mozilla have tried to sneak it in without telling anyone. By not being up front they’ve joined the users are just product crew.

neobrain 2y ago
This is a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature: https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/lddsaai/ https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_p... (Note that additionally when this post was written, the feature did not even truly do anything. It was running on an empty allow-list: https://mastodon.social/@jamesh@aus.social/112834742534943109 https://mastodon.social/@jamesh@aus.social/11283474253494310...)
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature You're correct: Mozilla didn't try to hide this. But they didn't try to talk about it either. This isn't an obscure about:config setting; it's a new revenue source [1]. [1] 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...
- Lio 2y ago
  Then where is the setting in the normal privacy preferences to turn it off? Instead it's been sneaked in behind a magic about:config URL and dialogue box saying: > Proceed with Caution > Changing advanced configuration preferences can impact Firefox performance or security. At the very least that is designed to discourage you from opting out.
  - neobrain 2y ago
    This is also false. Where are you pulling this from? There is a user-visible setting in the normal preferences. It's grayed out unless you have telemetry enabled. I think the initial version they shipped PPA in had no such option because, again, the feature didn't actually do anything at the time (and I'm not sure they expanded the allow list yet either).

weare138 2y ago

It's become painfully obvious Mozilla has abandon Firefox and are just exploiting what's left of it's reputation for profit. It time to fork Firefox and kick Mozilla to the curb.

zihotki 2y ago
There are already a plenty of forks. We need another player on the field. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ looks very promising.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Yes hopefully ladybird is the final nail in Mozillas coffin and the ladybird team shows that you don't need >$6.000.000.000 to build a proper browser. (written in Firefox)
- bugtodiffer 2y ago
  It's promising but like 10 years behind chromium
- youngtaff 2y ago
  Nah, not using Ladybird as I don’t want to support the person building it for various reasons
  - stephantul 2y ago
    Can you give more info?
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  First alpha in 2026…
- weare138 2y ago
  Ladybird does look really cool but what I mean is an alternative to the Mozilla Foundation as an official steward of what should be Firefox. Basically what Mozilla was originally created to do but obviously isn't anymore. They're just exploiting Firefox's users now. How much of what Mozilla brings in is actually going to improving Firefox? Google, the maker of the largest competitor in he browser market, has been paying off Mozilla's leadership to not compete in the browser market for like a decade now. Go research how much the c-suite was making over there at Mozilla while they were gutting the Firefox dev teams. And now Mozilla is straight up data mining Firefox's users. They obviously don't care what the users of Firefox think anymore because no one in the community asked for any of this crap. I don't think this needs to be explained to anyone here but modern web browsers are complicated as hell. We need viable open-source browsers but we also need a way to fund their development. Again what Mozilla was intended for. Hell it doesn't even need to be centered around Firefox specifically but we need some viable alternative to manage and fund these vital open-source projects.

cjpearson 2y ago

It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature. If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Yes, on an individual level you can mostly opt-out of this surveillance nightmare by using pi hole, uBlock origin, AdGuard etc. I do so myself. But keep in mind that this solution only works because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing. They deserve privacy too. So I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Why would an ad company ever use this instead of tracking users? Even if it exceeded <5% of users (or whatever Firefox has these days), why not just keep tracking and add this one more data point? It's a little like how "if you aren't paying, you're the product" turned into "if you pay, you're still the product".
- adjfasn47573 2y ago
  This. I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this. As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point. So it's worth nothing.
- izacus 2y ago
  Because it's easier and because it makes it impossible to make a case for any other kind of tracking under laws like GDPR once this exists.
  - dietr1ch 2y ago

CalRobert 2y ago

With wei/attestation and every site I go to begging me to log in with Google (and only Google) just to use it, it’s clear anonymous browsing will be dead soon.

falqun 2y ago

Hm, not sure if I did something against that already, but for me the option in about:preferences was unchecked and also I am unable to check it. I am not sure why that is, anyone has an idea?

evilpie 2y ago
If it's disabled (greyed-out), then you already have telemetry disabled.
bugtodiffer 2y ago
Because this went viral a few times now
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Eriks 2y ago

Set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false in about:config and problem solved. Not the first thing you should disable there and not the last.

ManBeardPc 2y ago

Opt-out is simply a violation of the EU GDPR. For me as an EU citizen it was checked after the update. I hope the data protection agencies have the capacity to punish this behavior, sadly a lot of bad actors still get away because there aren’t enough resources.

rawling 2y ago
Per Mozilla > The technology aims to demonstrate a way for advertisers to measure overall ad effectiveness without gathering information about specific individuals. If it doesn't collect personal data, does it fall under GDPR?
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  No. But the bar for “personal data” is very low, and any data that could conceivably be linked to an individual is personal data. I’m not familiar with how this function works, but Mozilla would almost certainly have to work quite hard to avoid falling foul of this: > ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
- ManBeardPc 2y ago
  It contains data about which ads you saw or clicked on as a histogram. GDPR defines personal data as follows: > The basic definition of personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (data subject). This data is then aggregated using their DAP service. This means to a third party. They say it's somehow encrypted and will be fully anonymized, but I can't fully understand the implementation. There are several security considerations mentioned in the draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppm-dap/. Doesn't matter that much, they have to ask for consent and inform the user in clear and understandable language anyway. Opt-out is a big no-no.

Argonaut998 2y ago

I’ve gone back to Brave. I really want to support a non-Chromium engine but Firefox have constantly slyly added features for its entire history. You need only open about:config and search for “telemetry” as an example. I honestly don’t know why people always rush to Firefox’s defense when their track record is as bad as Brave’s. The amount of hoops I have to jump through to get a private Firefox after installing it is significant. Even their latest update the other day re-enabled search recommendations.

wkat4242 2y ago

What's worse: The opt-out option is not even present in the mobile firefox app.

zaik 2y ago
Is this feature enabled on the mobile app?
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I wouldn't call it a "feature" but I'm not sure. Their announcement didn't mention either way (that it was everywhere or desktop only) The settings are present in about:config though (which is difficult to access on mobile also because they hide it). Hopefully they will abandon this plan anyway due to all the criticism. It won't do any good unless google is on board anyway.
nucleardog 2y ago
The functionality isn’t enabled in Firefox for Android. The justification is specifically that there’s no opt out available. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1909729#c5 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1909729#c5

talkin 2y ago

All posts like these, and all comments here up till now just don’t mention the Real Solution: Allow ads, forbid user targeted ads. If a site can not exist based on that instead of the current ads ‘needing 1337 partners’, tough luck. Also: maybe if targetting isnt allowed anymore, the value of the normal ads might increase a bit.

tzs 2y ago
The Firefox feature under discussion, PPA, has nothing to do with targeting. It's about attribution. It comes into play after you have seen an ad. If you later go visit the site the ad was promoting, it increments a counter maintained by Mozilla or by some company hired by Mozilla. Later the site the ad was for gets a report telling them something like that out of N people who saw the ad, M of those people later visited the site.
- talkin 2y ago
  Thanks for the clear words. :) But that still means both can go hand in hand! If user targeted ads and tracking is forbidden and a thing from the past, there’ll be less problems with having some proper statistical attribution. Hint: I’m from the EU and love the intention behind GDPR.

multimoon 2y ago

I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but I was a chrome user for well over a decade. I spent the last year or so trying to switch to Firefox (and did) because google implemented something similar to this in chrome. I used it for a year and then I switched back to chrome about 3mo ago because the writing was on the wall that Mozilla was going down the same route, just more slowly and a few years behind. I don’t see a reason to use Firefox if it’s going to have the same “features” that I just have disable in chrome, when chrome is still more performant. It’s really unfortunate that every alternative to chrome is either measurably slower or just a fork of chrome.