• slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    … I don’t know of this is satire or not.

    • There is now a feature labeled “Privacy-preserving ad measurement” near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
    • azdle@news.idlestate.orgOP
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      4 months ago

      Definitely satire, the context from earlier:

      1. Firefox is worse than Chrome in their implementation of ad snitching, because Chrome enables it only after user consent.
      • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        I mean, have you met people? They could be completely serious when posting that lol.

        • azdle@news.idlestate.orgOP
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          4 months ago

          [edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in

          Firefox is worse than Chrome

          is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.

          or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.

  • unskilled5117@feddit.org
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    4 months ago

    I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.

    The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.

    PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.

    Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:

    1. Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
    2. If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
    3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
    4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.

    This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.

    PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.

    This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.

    • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      My question is why Mozilla is trying to help advertisers at all instead of telling them to fuck off.

      • ahal@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.

        Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:

        1. Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
        2. Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.

        What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.

        And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.

        • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 months ago

          Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already.

          Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.

          Absolute nonsense. How does rejecting ads or even including a default adblocker make Firefox any less relevant? I would hope most people would be more than happy to use a platform free from ads.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Have you used the Internet before? Or used it without a clue how services are usually paid for? You sound a bit clueless. The day they do that, a lot of websites stop working and nagging the user to turn off adblock, which I see all the time (as an advanced user who expects it). If I was a normie who didn’t understand this it might be quite confusing. This is obviously the reason basically no mainstream browser has done this or would do it.

            • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Oh come on now everyone knows what an adblocker is. It’s right in the goddamn name: ad blocker, the thing that blocks ads.

              Even if they don’t know how to disable it they can just google it. And if they lack the skill to do that too, they couldn’t have succeeded installing Firefox in the first place.

              Stop trying to justify clearly unethical decisions because you used to like the entity who made the decision

              • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Understanding something doesn’t mean you support it. Sad so many people can’t understand this or how normal people operate.

                • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  4 months ago

                  I give zero fucks about “the way things are” or how they “have to work”, that’s propaganda to support inaction. I’ve lived my whole life blocking ads and giving the finger to advertisers, and telling me that ads make the world go round and that’s just the way it is regardless of personal opinion on the matter doesn’t jive well with me. Ads provide nothing useful to society, and fall in the same category as predatory CEOs and anticonsumer practices that generate a lot of revenue, but make the world over all a worse place to live. It’s not something to tolerate and put up with a