Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again
www.fastcompany.com
Mozilla is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish for years. But some of those investments may upset their community of die-hards.

Mozilla’s system only measures the success rate of ads—it doesn’t help companies target those ads—and it’s less susceptible to abuse, EFF’s Lena Cohen told @FastCompany@flipboard.com. “It’s much more privacy-preserving than Google’s version of the same feature.”

https://mastodon.social/@eff/112922761259324925

Privacy experts say the new toggle is mostly harmless, but Firefox users saw it as a betrayal.

“They made this technology for advertisers, specifically,” says Jonah Aragon, founder of the Privacy Guides website. “There’s no direct benefit to the user in creating this. It’s software that only serves a party other than the user.”

  • Vincent@feddit.nl
    1·
    11 months ago

    Sorry, I meant: what data does anyone get through this new capability? Mozilla could always get your IP address and other connection data when e.g. Firefox checks for updates, or add-ons, or safebrowsing lists, etc. Could you name one or two things that are part of “all the advertisement telemetry” that is new?

    Because advertisers already have better options.

    Better in the sense that they provide the same information with privacy guarantees that are just as good?

    Also, why do you need a guaranteed privacy increase? Why would we want to miss “opportunity to get us a future with improved privacy for everyone”?

      • Vincent@feddit.nl
        1·
        10 months ago

        If your argument is that nothing new is being collected, then there is no reason for Mozilla Corp to collect it and you agree with me that they should roll these changes back.

        I’ll also argue that no new data is being collected for vertical tabs, but I don’t see why that should mean that vertical tabs should be rolled back.

        Here’s a question for you: in what universe do corporations somehow implement Mozilla’s proprietary technology and actually increase privacy?

        Hopefully in this universe, a couple of years down the road, when legislators have become confident that they can legislate away the most invasive practices without putting lots of potential voters out of a job.

          • Vincent@feddit.nl
            1·
            10 months ago

            I’m saying it’s not collecting new personal data. It will be helping advertisers know how many of the clicks on a particular button were preceded by seeing a particular ad, but they won’t know a single thing about the people that did that.

              • Vincent@feddit.nl
                1·
                10 months ago

                Of course whoever make my browser had the capability to siphon it all off. But nothing in the PPA news has given me reason to believe that is happening: nobody has pointed out the source code that does it, or intercepted network requests in which they see it happening, or even just been able to name a single piece of personal data that is apparently being sold to advertising companies. You have not done so either.

                I also think that if Mozilla was trying to be sneaky, they could have done a better job than literally mentioning it in the release notes.

                  • Vincent@feddit.nl
                    1·
                    10 months ago

                    The main difference between Mozilla and Google is that Google is actually sucking up your data. For example, I can specifically mention that they’ve got stored where you log in often, what age they think you are, what gender, how rich you likely are, etc. Even if they’re completely honest about it, that’s not good. You can’t make such a list about Mozilla, and Mozilla doesn’t actively try to hide what they are doing (non-invasive measurement of ad performance).

                    Of course, the average user doesn’t read the release notes. (I’d go even further: the average user doesn’t read anything.) But the only reason you know about PPA, is because Mozilla explicitly called it out in the release notes, after which some bloggers decided to make a stink.

                    You’ve accused Mozilla of two separate things:

                    1. Collecting personal data (but can’t say what data)
                    2. Being sneaky about it (but they could just as well not have mentioned it in the release notes and you wouldn’t have known)