13 ms·

A free and open internet shouldn't come at the expense of privacy

107 points by nalinidash 2y ago

hoseja 2y ago
Gotta pay the CEO.
user3939382 2y ago
Then maybe Firefox can start shipping with defaults that don’t phone home to Mozilla several times when launching and closing? Mozilla harps on this privacy angle but I see it as purely marketing.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  The age old lament of "if the service is free, you are the product" comes to mind. Then again, we pay interest to credit card companies who regularly sell our data, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    If you're paying interest on your credit card, you're using them wrong. (Sole exception given to spend done out of duress, that balance should be paid ASAP but you may be excused because something had to give.)
    - 0xEF 2y ago
      Spoken like someone who does not have to make a choice between groceries or gassing up the car. Credit cards are predatory toward low-income individuals on purpose. When my vehicle needed $3000USD in repairs a few years ago, I did not have that money just laying around, so it went on the credit card. It would have taken me one month to pay that off if I did not also need to pay a mortgage, utility bills, student loans, groceries, and medical bills, on top of minor daily expenses people like you seem to forget exists when they want to punch down at someone less fortunate than them. When you already have nearly every dollar you make ear-marked, that "6 months interest free" crap might as well be a fart in the wind. So, cc's are doing exactly what they are supposed to do; keep us in a position of minimum payments because emergency high-dollar expenses will, inevitably, happen if you are a living human not fortunate enough to have been birthed in a higher tax bracket.
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        I mean, I'm in the 12% tax bracket and handling my credit cards just fine. Then again, I'm also accumulating some savings and not spending my entire paycheck let alone beyond my means. If you are paying interest on credit cards, that means either of two things: A) You're one of the unluckiest men in the world having one shit thrown at you after another. I sympathize and hope you can get that balance paid off soon. B) You're terrible with money and can't budget nor save to save your own life. I don't sympathize, but I will encourage you to learn how to budget and grow the necessary maturity to cut down expenses you don't truly need and can't afford. Also, banks hate credit card holders carrying balances. Banks make their money off merchant and transaction fees, not interest payments; they very much prefer card holders who pay their statement balance in full every time.
        user3939382 2y ago
        Banks definitely make money on interest, what are you talking about?
        Dalewyn 2y ago
        Maybe my choice of words was insufficient, my apologies. What I mean is making money off of interest is not their first choice. Interest money is not guaranteed, there is no collateral securing that debt. If the debtor (card holder) can't or doesn't pay up, the bank lost that money. Banks prefer making money off of fees which are guaranteed revenue, and they strongly incentivize card holders to not carry balances over by waiving interest if statement balances are paid in full every time.
        0xEF 2y ago
        Lol, okay, you definitely do not know what you are talking about. Sorry for engaging. I will stop wasting my time.
        Dalewyn 2y ago
- mrweasel 2y ago
  If someone in the EU sues Mozilla they will be forced to. The default shipping telemetry to Mozilla can't be legal, that has to be opt-in. The management at Mozilla is about to do what I predicted a while back: They'll pivot to become an advertising company. Firefox is no longer the main product, it exists only to support the emerging ad business.
  - ntp85 2y ago
    Seems like NOYB already filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authorities: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Data-protection-complaint-Noyb-takes-action-against-Firefox-tracking-function-9953464.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Data-protection-complaint-Noyb-...
eesmith 2y ago
Says the organization which doesn't accept personal donations to fund Mozilla, and which doesn't seek government grants, like 'digital sovereignty' grants the EU might give to keep its citizens out of Sauron's dark eye. You should be able to connect to your government's websites without being required to use a browser which is deliberately built to engage in advertising and which tracks you without real and effective informed consent. Mozilla is saying that user-tracking is the only viable advertising model for any future web, and that even laws mandating only contextual advertising, with actual informed consent for anything else, is not something to consider. I wanted to be able to tell my local schools to install Firefox instead of Chrome, because otherwise you are teaching the kids to depend and trust in Google. I cannot do that now, because I don't now trust in Firefox, which means placing my trust in one of the Firefox forks - and there's no way I can convince the schools to do that. > And we’ll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy That's exactly the chicanery I've come to expect from Firefox. I'm okay with advertisers which don't build up a tracking profile. For the ones that do - fuck them and drain their bank accounts.
perihelions 2y ago
Mozilla's title, "A free and open internet shouldn't come at the expense of privacy", is very misleading about the content of the article. In plain speech, the article's about Mozilla looking for new ways to deliver ads in web browsers. Maybe this is a suitable place for mods to override the original title and write a non-deceptive one. edit: Here's a few other threads on the same topic (of Mozilla's advocacy of a "privacy-preserving attribution", or "interoperable private attribution", of browser ads): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 ("Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature (noyb.eu)"; 14 days ago, 130 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 ("A word about private attribution in Firefox (reddit.com)"; 85 days ago, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 (""Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" (mastodon.social)"; 87 days ago, 187 comments)
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  It is a lie on part of Mozilla. A logic that only makes sense with a lot of false premises, like the necessity and inevitably of surveillance advertising. A simple legislative change and all that would be illegal without it hitting the economy at all with exception of some parts of the advertising industry. I don't know what changed for Mozilla, but this doesn't look like a way into the future. Or maybe they want to go that way, but they then should release Firefox/Thunderbird from ambitions like these. These project had other goals than what Mozilla today espouses.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > It is a lie on part of Mozilla. I agree. > A simple legislative change There's no such thing as a "simple legislative change" when big money and powerful companies are involved.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      True. It would only technically be simple, not politically. This reluctance of legislative forces should be remembered when they try to get power over social media or other platforms to "protect the kids".
tokai 2y ago
«“…a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical … “ to creating an open, healthy internet.» Just nah. Public benefit and openness should come first. Commercial profit should be made around that. They should not balance each other.
deafpolygon 2y ago
Rich, coming from a company about to get in bed with advertising companies.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
zecg 2y ago
Yeah, fuck off, Mozilla. I don't want ads and will not see ads. I don't care if all the content that requires money goes away. In fact, I would prefer it. You fucked up big time when you opted me into your "virginity preserving sex" without my consent. You should have written missives like this before pushing that option and EXPLAINED how it's preserving privacy.
doublerabbit 2y ago
> However, I can imagine a world where advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance. That’s a world I want to help build. How? Anything commercial is designed to make money and a business doesn't solely exist for the person. You can't wholly align public interests with commercial, it's just not possible. Keep dreaming there Mark, there is no respect in advertising. With advertising your always forcibly exploiting someone to force something.
probably_wrong 2y ago
I've changed the term "advertising" for "being racist" in one of their paragraphs to better highlight how the disconnections in this article makes me feel: "We started [being racist] because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-respecting, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can’t just ignore [being racist] — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in [being racist] over the past few years." You don't fix a problem by becoming part of it. "Those who fight monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters".
- immibis 2y ago
  If it results in a net reduction in [being racist] I support it.
  - mossTechnician 2y ago
    Moz partnered with one of the most [racist groups] to produce it, and it looks very similar to what another huge [racist group] was doing, except that [group] got criticized because we already knew it was [racist].
    - immibis 2y ago
      If it results in a net reduction of [being racist] I support it.
      - mossTechnician 2y ago
        The "if" in your statement is doing some heavy implication that this will somehow be the case. Can you provide your opinion and some backing for it, rather than simply saying "if"?
dns_snek 2y ago
Mozilla's level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts, and their ongoing demise is an actual tragedy. You're still tracking people, you just do it in a roundabout way that may preserve privacy on a technicality, and even that much is questionable. Even if this goal was achieved, it would only alleviate a small part of what is a fundamentally broken industry. Claiming to promote a healthy web is just preposterous. Commercialization of the web through ads combined with the force multiplier that are garbage-generating LLMs, is thrashing the web and destroying its legacy at an unprecedented rate.
emaro 2y ago
And ethical ads shouldn't come at the expense of a private browser. Incentives are easily comprimised.
- account42 2y ago
  There is no such thing as ethical ads. It's an oxymoron.
  - emaro 2y ago
    I agree but it's what they're trying to sell if I understand it correctly.
actualwitch 2y ago
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- guerrilla 2y ago
  You're making the mistaking of assuming it's the same people. MSny camps live on this site.
  - actualwitch 2y ago
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- meiraleal 2y ago
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ThinkBeat 2y ago
The free and open internet is damn close to being on the very last leg of its stay at the ICU and there is little reason to expect a recovery. It us all hugely centralized, stuffed with ad inside ads, and propaganda inside propaganda like a matryoshka doll. With monetization as the main driving force. Perhaps the ever-present dream of becoming famous. (and rich) Those giants abuse their position to kill off what little remains. For many the web is "YouTube,Tiktok,Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Telegram etc"
- timbit42 2y ago
  Is the internet, 'hugely centralized', or is it just the web that is?
  - ThinkBeat 2y ago
    Email as moved to centralized for the most part. IRC have moved on to centralized silos for the most part Usenet has largely moved on. finger has moved on. Note you can still run these tools on your own if you want. It is getting progressivly harder. I have given up running my own mail server, since the "big silos" have a strong tendency to reject emails from small servers.
hrkucuk 2y ago
Reading the comment section, I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing by trying to look for ways to add <<ads>> into the browser. And I am curious, is anybody aware of a good alternative browser or even just an alternative way to what Mozilla should be doing instead? I use brave mostly but I am not sure if their ad blocking is any good under the hood or not... Seeing a company like Mozilla behaving like this, I honestly don't know who or what to trust anymore...
- pbronez 2y ago
  Orion is making progress. It’s developed by Kagi.
  - bakugo 2y ago
    It's mac-only with seemingly no plans to port it to other platforms, so not really a viable alternative.
    - noirscape 2y ago
      It's also running WebKit, so it's basically going to be a modified Safari.
- andrewl-hn 2y ago
  It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines. So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies? The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
ewuhic 2y ago
Thief says stealing is bad.
Timber-6539 2y ago
Advertising and a free & open internet are antithetical. Look at how much social media, YouTube, ADL etc. are all collaborating on how to curtail free speech because of and on behalf of advertisers.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Targeted advertising and a free & open internet are antithetical. There's nothing wrong with sites that embed the same ad for everyone, much like you would do for print advertising.
  - account42 2y ago
    Regular advertising is what brought us targetted advertising in the first place. Greed doesn't stop at a sustainable profit. The internet was much better when most websites were not profit driven.
endgame 2y ago
Ladybird cannot come soon enough.
- Intermernet 2y ago
  Improving in leaps and bounds. If you have some spare cash, I think it's a good project to contribute to.
  - endgame 2y ago
    Yep, I'm already a sponsor.
nalinidash 2y ago
Related articles: From Laura Chambers, CEO: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-adverti... From Brad Smallwood of anonym: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overview/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overv...
phoronixrly 2y ago
Mozilla, put the consumers first. Ad performance tracking must only involve the websites and the ad providers. The users, respectively the user agent must be left out of it.
renegat0x0 2y ago
- there are many web-browsers - none of them matters, if your browser does not support features, like DRM, because firefox ships with these features - it is hard to browse the web without a niche browser, as some sites do not work - most popular Linux OS'es ship with firefox. I think this will not change any time soon. For the situation to change something more ground breaking should happen. Until then we are barking at the moon - I use more RSS reader nowadays, so browsers important (but not as much, for surfing). My reader shows YT videos in iframe, etc, etc
openrisk 2y ago
> We can’t just ignore online advertising - it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there. So everything that follows is compromised. Advertising has been made a major driver, actually the only driver. It does not need to be a major driver and certainly not the only driver. And, spoiler alert, it cannot continue being a major driver. Yes, advertising is a big and varied business with at least one century of storied successes (and how exactly it is done can range from the outright immoral to various shades of ethical). But society and the economy is much, much bigger than advertising. They can easily fund (and do so continuously in a vast range of domains) the infrastructures they need to function properly. The internet is not a platform for ads. Its the digital canvas on which pretty much all of current life unfolds and will do so even more in the future. Some sort of digital advertising business will be happening in the market driven / consumerist societies that are the current form of socioeconomic organization. But it is parochial, backward looking and eventually a dead-end to continue ignoring the much more fundamental role of internet infrastructure. If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.
- danaris 2y ago
  So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising". The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper. So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites. Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dns_snek 2y ago
isodev 2y ago
lol, that’s rich coming from Mozilla. In fact, every Big Tech currently marketing “privacy” (including Apple) means something else. It’s just a buzzword now, like crypto used to be about encryption.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Don't forget AI, which used to be about artificial intelligence and is now about (much) better text prediction.
_heimdall 2y ago
Through all the discussions of privacy and online advertising, I don't think I've ever actually seen the focus put specifically on the fact that targeted advertising online is really the problem. Websites could ship with advertising that mimics print ads - the same ad is shown to everyone and the ads are targeted based only on the overall content of the site and the general market that is likely to browse it. Advertising can absolutely still exist online, targeting should simply not be possible. That would mean losing a ton of functionality online as well, but it can be done. Get rid of cookies entirely and get rid of or at least minimize the number of headers that identify a browser and OS. Authentication would need to be handled differently for many sites, but that's a solvable problem.
- squigz 2y ago
  What's a session cookie, Alex?
  - svieira 2y ago
    To put it another way for those who don't web-dev much. Getting rid of cookies completely _requires_ that any authenticated experience becomes an SPA (e. g. only works with JavaScript enabled). The sole alternative available today is to include the session identifier in the URL, which means the end user cannot share links safely and that anything that logs the URL logs the session key. Everything that browser makers are suggesting as a replacement for cookies also requires JS to function.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      The hot take here, and one I'd be really interested to see proven wrong, is that we can't have cookies and privacy online. User authorization is a very specific use case. Cookies are a generic solution, if we only care about that one use case there is likely a solution that wouldn't open the door for the privacy-destroying tracking that we don't want. As far as SPAs go, without cookies SPAs could still have issues. User author tokens can be stored in local storage and included with all API requests, but that has its own security issues.
drawkward 2y ago
Advertising is a virus that will eventually infect all ecosystems.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1oooqooq 2y ago
do we still do car analogies? "thieves are breaking car windows to steal. so we at Mozilla car company, who believe in drivers taking back the road, will move the glove box to be accessible from the outside, because we believe our cars can coexist in roads filled with thieves, who used to pay our bills until last month btw."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

107 points by nalinidash 2y ago

Gotta pay the CEO.

Then maybe Firefox can start shipping with defaults that don’t phone home to Mozilla several times when launching and closing? Mozilla harps on this privacy angle but I see it as purely marketing.

0xEF 2y ago
The age old lament of "if the service is free, you are the product" comes to mind. Then again, we pay interest to credit card companies who regularly sell our data, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  If you're paying interest on your credit card, you're using them wrong. (Sole exception given to spend done out of duress, that balance should be paid ASAP but you may be excused because something had to give.)
  - 0xEF 2y ago
    Spoken like someone who does not have to make a choice between groceries or gassing up the car. Credit cards are predatory toward low-income individuals on purpose. When my vehicle needed $3000USD in repairs a few years ago, I did not have that money just laying around, so it went on the credit card. It would have taken me one month to pay that off if I did not also need to pay a mortgage, utility bills, student loans, groceries, and medical bills, on top of minor daily expenses people like you seem to forget exists when they want to punch down at someone less fortunate than them. When you already have nearly every dollar you make ear-marked, that "6 months interest free" crap might as well be a fart in the wind. So, cc's are doing exactly what they are supposed to do; keep us in a position of minimum payments because emergency high-dollar expenses will, inevitably, happen if you are a living human not fortunate enough to have been birthed in a higher tax bracket.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      I mean, I'm in the 12% tax bracket and handling my credit cards just fine. Then again, I'm also accumulating some savings and not spending my entire paycheck let alone beyond my means. If you are paying interest on credit cards, that means either of two things: A) You're one of the unluckiest men in the world having one shit thrown at you after another. I sympathize and hope you can get that balance paid off soon. B) You're terrible with money and can't budget nor save to save your own life. I don't sympathize, but I will encourage you to learn how to budget and grow the necessary maturity to cut down expenses you don't truly need and can't afford. Also, banks hate credit card holders carrying balances. Banks make their money off merchant and transaction fees, not interest payments; they very much prefer card holders who pay their statement balance in full every time.
      - user3939382 2y ago
        Banks definitely make money on interest, what are you talking about?
        Dalewyn 2y ago
        Maybe my choice of words was insufficient, my apologies. What I mean is making money off of interest is not their first choice. Interest money is not guaranteed, there is no collateral securing that debt. If the debtor (card holder) can't or doesn't pay up, the bank lost that money. Banks prefer making money off of fees which are guaranteed revenue, and they strongly incentivize card holders to not carry balances over by waiving interest if statement balances are paid in full every time.
        0xEF 2y ago
        Lol, okay, you definitely do not know what you are talking about. Sorry for engaging. I will stop wasting my time.
        Dalewyn 2y ago
mrweasel 2y ago
If someone in the EU sues Mozilla they will be forced to. The default shipping telemetry to Mozilla can't be legal, that has to be opt-in. The management at Mozilla is about to do what I predicted a while back: They'll pivot to become an advertising company. Firefox is no longer the main product, it exists only to support the emerging ad business.
- ntp85 2y ago
  Seems like NOYB already filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authorities: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Data-protection-complaint-Noyb-takes-action-against-Firefox-tracking-function-9953464.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Data-protection-complaint-Noyb-...

eesmith 2y ago

Says the organization which doesn't accept personal donations to fund Mozilla, and which doesn't seek government grants, like 'digital sovereignty' grants the EU might give to keep its citizens out of Sauron's dark eye. You should be able to connect to your government's websites without being required to use a browser which is deliberately built to engage in advertising and which tracks you without real and effective informed consent. Mozilla is saying that user-tracking is the only viable advertising model for any future web, and that even laws mandating only contextual advertising, with actual informed consent for anything else, is not something to consider. I wanted to be able to tell my local schools to install Firefox instead of Chrome, because otherwise you are teaching the kids to depend and trust in Google. I cannot do that now, because I don't now trust in Firefox, which means placing my trust in one of the Firefox forks - and there's no way I can convince the schools to do that. > And we’ll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy That's exactly the chicanery I've come to expect from Firefox. I'm okay with advertisers which don't build up a tracking profile. For the ones that do - fuck them and drain their bank accounts.

perihelions 2y ago

Mozilla's title, "A free and open internet shouldn't come at the expense of privacy", is very misleading about the content of the article. In plain speech, the article's about Mozilla looking for new ways to deliver ads in web browsers. Maybe this is a suitable place for mods to override the original title and write a non-deceptive one. edit: Here's a few other threads on the same topic (of Mozilla's advocacy of a "privacy-preserving attribution", or "interoperable private attribution", of browser ads): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 ("Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature (noyb.eu)"; 14 days ago, 130 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 ("A word about private attribution in Firefox (reddit.com)"; 85 days ago, 102 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 (""Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" (mastodon.social)"; 87 days ago, 187 comments)

raxxorraxor 2y ago
It is a lie on part of Mozilla. A logic that only makes sense with a lot of false premises, like the necessity and inevitably of surveillance advertising. A simple legislative change and all that would be illegal without it hitting the economy at all with exception of some parts of the advertising industry. I don't know what changed for Mozilla, but this doesn't look like a way into the future. Or maybe they want to go that way, but they then should release Firefox/Thunderbird from ambitions like these. These project had other goals than what Mozilla today espouses.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > It is a lie on part of Mozilla. I agree. > A simple legislative change There's no such thing as a "simple legislative change" when big money and powerful companies are involved.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    True. It would only technically be simple, not politically. This reluctance of legislative forces should be remembered when they try to get power over social media or other platforms to "protect the kids".

tokai 2y ago

«“…a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical … “ to creating an open, healthy internet.» Just nah. Public benefit and openness should come first. Commercial profit should be made around that. They should not balance each other.

deafpolygon 2y ago

Rich, coming from a company about to get in bed with advertising companies.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

zecg 2y ago

Yeah, fuck off, Mozilla. I don't want ads and will not see ads. I don't care if all the content that requires money goes away. In fact, I would prefer it. You fucked up big time when you opted me into your "virginity preserving sex" without my consent. You should have written missives like this before pushing that option and EXPLAINED how it's preserving privacy.

doublerabbit 2y ago

> However, I can imagine a world where advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance. That’s a world I want to help build. How? Anything commercial is designed to make money and a business doesn't solely exist for the person. You can't wholly align public interests with commercial, it's just not possible. Keep dreaming there Mark, there is no respect in advertising. With advertising your always forcibly exploiting someone to force something.

probably_wrong 2y ago

I've changed the term "advertising" for "being racist" in one of their paragraphs to better highlight how the disconnections in this article makes me feel: "We started [being racist] because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-respecting, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can’t just ignore [being racist] — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in [being racist] over the past few years." You don't fix a problem by becoming part of it. "Those who fight monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters".

immibis 2y ago
If it results in a net reduction in [being racist] I support it.
- mossTechnician 2y ago
  Moz partnered with one of the most [racist groups] to produce it, and it looks very similar to what another huge [racist group] was doing, except that [group] got criticized because we already knew it was [racist].
  - immibis 2y ago
    If it results in a net reduction of [being racist] I support it.
    - mossTechnician 2y ago
      The "if" in your statement is doing some heavy implication that this will somehow be the case. Can you provide your opinion and some backing for it, rather than simply saying "if"?

dns_snek 2y ago

Mozilla's level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts, and their ongoing demise is an actual tragedy. You're still tracking people, you just do it in a roundabout way that may preserve privacy on a technicality, and even that much is questionable. Even if this goal was achieved, it would only alleviate a small part of what is a fundamentally broken industry. Claiming to promote a healthy web is just preposterous. Commercialization of the web through ads combined with the force multiplier that are garbage-generating LLMs, is thrashing the web and destroying its legacy at an unprecedented rate.

emaro 2y ago

And ethical ads shouldn't come at the expense of a private browser. Incentives are easily comprimised.

account42 2y ago
There is no such thing as ethical ads. It's an oxymoron.
- emaro 2y ago
  I agree but it's what they're trying to sell if I understand it correctly.

actualwitch 2y ago

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guerrilla 2y ago
You're making the mistaking of assuming it's the same people. MSny camps live on this site.
- actualwitch 2y ago
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meiraleal 2y ago
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- actualwitch 2y ago
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    - actualwitch 2y ago
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      - meiraleal 2y ago
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        actualwitch 2y ago
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ThinkBeat 2y ago

The free and open internet is damn close to being on the very last leg of its stay at the ICU and there is little reason to expect a recovery. It us all hugely centralized, stuffed with ad inside ads, and propaganda inside propaganda like a matryoshka doll. With monetization as the main driving force. Perhaps the ever-present dream of becoming famous. (and rich) Those giants abuse their position to kill off what little remains. For many the web is "YouTube,Tiktok,Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Telegram etc"

timbit42 2y ago
Is the internet, 'hugely centralized', or is it just the web that is?
- ThinkBeat 2y ago
  Email as moved to centralized for the most part. IRC have moved on to centralized silos for the most part Usenet has largely moved on. finger has moved on. Note you can still run these tools on your own if you want. It is getting progressivly harder. I have given up running my own mail server, since the "big silos" have a strong tendency to reject emails from small servers.

hrkucuk 2y ago

Reading the comment section, I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing by trying to look for ways to add <<ads>> into the browser. And I am curious, is anybody aware of a good alternative browser or even just an alternative way to what Mozilla should be doing instead? I use brave mostly but I am not sure if their ad blocking is any good under the hood or not... Seeing a company like Mozilla behaving like this, I honestly don't know who or what to trust anymore...

pbronez 2y ago
Orion is making progress. It’s developed by Kagi.
- bakugo 2y ago
  It's mac-only with seemingly no plans to port it to other platforms, so not really a viable alternative.
  - noirscape 2y ago
    It's also running WebKit, so it's basically going to be a modified Safari.
andrewl-hn 2y ago
It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines. So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies? The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.

ewuhic 2y ago

Thief says stealing is bad.

Timber-6539 2y ago

Advertising and a free & open internet are antithetical. Look at how much social media, YouTube, ADL etc. are all collaborating on how to curtail free speech because of and on behalf of advertisers.

_heimdall 2y ago
Targeted advertising and a free & open internet are antithetical. There's nothing wrong with sites that embed the same ad for everyone, much like you would do for print advertising.
- account42 2y ago
  Regular advertising is what brought us targetted advertising in the first place. Greed doesn't stop at a sustainable profit. The internet was much better when most websites were not profit driven.

endgame 2y ago

Ladybird cannot come soon enough.

Intermernet 2y ago
Improving in leaps and bounds. If you have some spare cash, I think it's a good project to contribute to.
- endgame 2y ago
  Yep, I'm already a sponsor.

nalinidash 2y ago

Related articles: From Laura Chambers, CEO: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-adverti... From Brad Smallwood of anonym: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overview/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overv...

phoronixrly 2y ago

Mozilla, put the consumers first. Ad performance tracking must only involve the websites and the ad providers. The users, respectively the user agent must be left out of it.

renegat0x0 2y ago

- there are many web-browsers - none of them matters, if your browser does not support features, like DRM, because firefox ships with these features - it is hard to browse the web without a niche browser, as some sites do not work - most popular Linux OS'es ship with firefox. I think this will not change any time soon. For the situation to change something more ground breaking should happen. Until then we are barking at the moon - I use more RSS reader nowadays, so browsers important (but not as much, for surfing). My reader shows YT videos in iframe, etc, etc

openrisk 2y ago

> We can’t just ignore online advertising - it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there. So everything that follows is compromised. Advertising has been made a major driver, actually the only driver. It does not need to be a major driver and certainly not the only driver. And, spoiler alert, it cannot continue being a major driver. Yes, advertising is a big and varied business with at least one century of storied successes (and how exactly it is done can range from the outright immoral to various shades of ethical). But society and the economy is much, much bigger than advertising. They can easily fund (and do so continuously in a vast range of domains) the infrastructures they need to function properly. The internet is not a platform for ads. Its the digital canvas on which pretty much all of current life unfolds and will do so even more in the future. Some sort of digital advertising business will be happening in the market driven / consumerist societies that are the current form of socioeconomic organization. But it is parochial, backward looking and eventually a dead-end to continue ignoring the much more fundamental role of internet infrastructure. If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.

danaris 2y ago
So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising". The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper. So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites. Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
- deleted 2y ago
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- dns_snek 2y ago

isodev 2y ago

lol, that’s rich coming from Mozilla. In fact, every Big Tech currently marketing “privacy” (including Apple) means something else. It’s just a buzzword now, like crypto used to be about encryption.

_heimdall 2y ago
Don't forget AI, which used to be about artificial intelligence and is now about (much) better text prediction.

_heimdall 2y ago

Through all the discussions of privacy and online advertising, I don't think I've ever actually seen the focus put specifically on the fact that targeted advertising online is really the problem. Websites could ship with advertising that mimics print ads - the same ad is shown to everyone and the ads are targeted based only on the overall content of the site and the general market that is likely to browse it. Advertising can absolutely still exist online, targeting should simply not be possible. That would mean losing a ton of functionality online as well, but it can be done. Get rid of cookies entirely and get rid of or at least minimize the number of headers that identify a browser and OS. Authentication would need to be handled differently for many sites, but that's a solvable problem.

squigz 2y ago
What's a session cookie, Alex?
- svieira 2y ago
  To put it another way for those who don't web-dev much. Getting rid of cookies completely _requires_ that any authenticated experience becomes an SPA (e. g. only works with JavaScript enabled). The sole alternative available today is to include the session identifier in the URL, which means the end user cannot share links safely and that anything that logs the URL logs the session key. Everything that browser makers are suggesting as a replacement for cookies also requires JS to function.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    The hot take here, and one I'd be really interested to see proven wrong, is that we can't have cookies and privacy online. User authorization is a very specific use case. Cookies are a generic solution, if we only care about that one use case there is likely a solution that wouldn't open the door for the privacy-destroying tracking that we don't want. As far as SPAs go, without cookies SPAs could still have issues. User author tokens can be stored in local storage and included with all API requests, but that has its own security issues.

drawkward 2y ago

Advertising is a virus that will eventually infect all ecosystems.

deleted 2y ago

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1oooqooq 2y ago

do we still do car analogies? "thieves are breaking car windows to steal. so we at Mozilla car company, who believe in drivers taking back the road, will move the glove box to be accessible from the outside, because we believe our cars can coexist in roads filled with thieves, who used to pay our bills until last month btw."

deleted 2y ago

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