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It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0] It may also be relevant that Meta

It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0] It may also be relevant that Meta is recently upsetting people in Europe for tracking and targeting people in spite of Europe's data protection rules [1]. My guess (and this is just speculation at this point) is that Meta and Mozilla think they're being clever and getting away with some "private" ad tracking and are underestimating how much damage they're doing to Mozilla's reputation. I doubt the Anonym tech has been built into Firefox yet, but it's clear that the corporate strategic direction is to bet on some concept of "acceptable ads" like Google did in the 90s. [0] https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-a-privacy-tech-startup-founded-by-two-top-former-meta-execs/ https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-... [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/digital-rights-activists-file-complaints-europe-over-metas-targeted-ads-2025-02-27/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/digital-rights-activists-...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Facebook is sort of tech’s Enron / McDonnell Douglas.
nerdponx 2y ago
> "private" ad tracking My guess is that they're aiming to pivot to become a Brave competitor, and either find a new (profitable) niche in the market, or just ride the business down to collapse. Don't forget that private, hard-to-access data is now doubly valuable as AI training data.
_aavaa_ 2y ago
Ahh, the Unity game engine special.
cmcaleer 2y ago
Mozilla mentioned their viability in this statement, but one has to wonder how much more viable they’d be had they not wasted tens of millions of dollars on acquisitions such as this, Pocket, and of course their former CEO’s salary. I would happily donate to a company that focussed on just making Firefox and Thunderbird, but the reason why I don’t and probably will not donate to Mozilla ever again is that I have no idea what hare-brained acquisition they’ll do next. Their mission and plan for the future is so incomprehensible that it’s probably just easier to assume actual malice.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  > it’s probably just easier to assume actual malice The easiest assumption to make is greed and foolishness.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    Dishonesty in pursuit of greed equals malice.
- mmooss 2y ago
  What is their profit or loss from Pocket?
- debugnik 2y ago
  > but the reason why I don’t and probably will not donate to Mozilla ever again is that I have no idea what hare-brained acquisition they’ll do next. You can't donate to Mozilla Corporation at all, which is the entity maintaining Firefox and running these acquisitions. You can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which funds other campaigns.
  - gabeio 2y ago
    > You can't donate to Mozilla Corporation at all, which is the entity maintaining Firefox and running these acquisitions. You can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which funds other campaigns. The Mozilla Foundation is the parent of the Mozilla Corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    - lolinder 2y ago
      But donations to the Foundation cannot legally be spent on the Corporation's projects, of which Firefox is one.
    - debugnik 2y ago
      Which means the Corporation's profits flow upwards to the Foundation. But donations to the latter can't easily flow downwards to a for-profit.
mmooss 2y ago
> It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0] That greatly misrepresents what the article says; really Mozilla acquired a company with a mission to get user data out of the advertising industry, which happened to be founded by former Meta employees: Two years after leaving Meta to launch their own privacy-focused ad measurement startup in 2022, Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood have sold their company to Mozilla. ... Mozilla had initially been talking to Anonym, which uses privacy-enhancing technologies to build measurement and targeting solutions, about a potential partnership. “But that quickly turned into, ‘Wow, our missions are basically the same,’” Chambers said. “We realized that together we could move a lot faster.” That shared mission is predicated on the notion that advertising and privacy are not – or at least don’t have to be – mutually exclusive. “We both believe that privacy-preserving technologies are a critical part of the solution to the privacy problem in digital advertising,” Chambers said. ... Anonym also has technology that allows ad platforms and advertisers to securely share encrypted impression and conversion data within a trusted execution environment for attribution, causal lift measurement and lookalike modeling. (A trusted execution environment is the secure area of a main processor where code can be run safely and in isolation.) To be fair, the major ad platforms have long offered attribution and measurement solutions, Mudd said. “But they required the data to come into their system,” he added. “In this world, that doesn’t have to happen.”
- wtallis 2y ago
  > Anonym also has technology that allows ad platforms and advertisers to securely share encrypted impression and conversion data within a trusted execution environment for attribution, causal lift measurement and lookalike modeling. Wow, "secure", "encrypted", and "trusted" all in one sentence. They're trying to make it sound as reassuring as possible, but they're still doing tracking.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    They're not, in fact. That's the whole point of their business. Where does it say they are tracking anyone - which means recording personal information?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Facebook is sort of tech’s Enron / McDonnell Douglas.

nerdponx 2y ago

> "private" ad tracking My guess is that they're aiming to pivot to become a Brave competitor, and either find a new (profitable) niche in the market, or just ride the business down to collapse. Don't forget that private, hard-to-access data is now doubly valuable as AI training data.

_aavaa_ 2y ago

Ahh, the Unity game engine special.

cmcaleer 2y ago

Mozilla mentioned their viability in this statement, but one has to wonder how much more viable they’d be had they not wasted tens of millions of dollars on acquisitions such as this, Pocket, and of course their former CEO’s salary. I would happily donate to a company that focussed on just making Firefox and Thunderbird, but the reason why I don’t and probably will not donate to Mozilla ever again is that I have no idea what hare-brained acquisition they’ll do next. Their mission and plan for the future is so incomprehensible that it’s probably just easier to assume actual malice.

Vegenoid 2y ago
> it’s probably just easier to assume actual malice The easiest assumption to make is greed and foolishness.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  Dishonesty in pursuit of greed equals malice.
mmooss 2y ago
What is their profit or loss from Pocket?
debugnik 2y ago
> but the reason why I don’t and probably will not donate to Mozilla ever again is that I have no idea what hare-brained acquisition they’ll do next. You can't donate to Mozilla Corporation at all, which is the entity maintaining Firefox and running these acquisitions. You can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which funds other campaigns.
- gabeio 2y ago
  > You can't donate to Mozilla Corporation at all, which is the entity maintaining Firefox and running these acquisitions. You can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which funds other campaigns. The Mozilla Foundation is the parent of the Mozilla Corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - lolinder 2y ago
    But donations to the Foundation cannot legally be spent on the Corporation's projects, of which Firefox is one.
  - debugnik 2y ago
    Which means the Corporation's profits flow upwards to the Foundation. But donations to the latter can't easily flow downwards to a for-profit.

mmooss 2y ago

> It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0] That greatly misrepresents what the article says; really Mozilla acquired a company with a mission to get user data out of the advertising industry, which happened to be founded by former Meta employees: Two years after leaving Meta to launch their own privacy-focused ad measurement startup in 2022, Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood have sold their company to Mozilla. ... Mozilla had initially been talking to Anonym, which uses privacy-enhancing technologies to build measurement and targeting solutions, about a potential partnership. “But that quickly turned into, ‘Wow, our missions are basically the same,’” Chambers said. “We realized that together we could move a lot faster.” That shared mission is predicated on the notion that advertising and privacy are not – or at least don’t have to be – mutually exclusive. “We both believe that privacy-preserving technologies are a critical part of the solution to the privacy problem in digital advertising,” Chambers said. ... Anonym also has technology that allows ad platforms and advertisers to securely share encrypted impression and conversion data within a trusted execution environment for attribution, causal lift measurement and lookalike modeling. (A trusted execution environment is the secure area of a main processor where code can be run safely and in isolation.) To be fair, the major ad platforms have long offered attribution and measurement solutions, Mudd said. “But they required the data to come into their system,” he added. “In this world, that doesn’t have to happen.”

wtallis 2y ago
> Anonym also has technology that allows ad platforms and advertisers to securely share encrypted impression and conversion data within a trusted execution environment for attribution, causal lift measurement and lookalike modeling. Wow, "secure", "encrypted", and "trusted" all in one sentence. They're trying to make it sound as reassuring as possible, but they're still doing tracking.
- mmooss 2y ago
  They're not, in fact. That's the whole point of their business. Where does it say they are tracking anyone - which means recording personal information?