cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598

Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

  • BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip
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    43 minutes ago

    Yet another Mozilla hit piece that seemingly-intentionally misrepresents the good they’re doing for users.

    It begs the question: who has the means and motivation to consistently pay “journalists” to malign the only browser that has the slightest chance of tearing any significant amount of users away from chromium-based browsers?

      • yikerman@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        I installed local-network-wide DNS adblockers. After the change my mother found me and asked me why she couldn’t see the ads: she needed the ads and were enjoying them.

    • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      That’s really nuts to me when I run into it in the wild. It’s so easy and such a qol upgrade. I know a guy who self hosts a bunch of services, programming job, but does not use any ad block at all. He’s on the computer all day. Just looking at ads.

      • refalo@programming.dev
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        4 hours ago

        such a qol upgrade

        I don’t think you’re wrong, but I do think that if everyone thought that, they would be doing it already.

        I have routinely tried to get friends and family to use ad-blockers and they simply don’t care enough to even attempt to download one.

  • fireshell@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    I can already see a crowd of advertisers running to them for the remaining 3% of its users.

    • parpol@programming.dev
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      12 hours ago

      Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that’s also not what is happening. They’re trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.

      I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don’t care about ads at least don’t get tracked.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
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        7 hours ago

        They are not trying to “replace” cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.

        Then there’s the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.

        This comment alone:

        “As part of this work, we are also committing to being transparent and open about our intent and plans prior to launching tests or features.”

        … means they have no intention to be honest about shit.

        • parpol@programming.dev
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          6 hours ago

          It doesn’t track users. It collects anonymous statistics and assign them to a unique ID without storing any other information about the user.

          And it IS meant to replace cookies, but you can’t just replace them all at once and disable the legacy cookies. It is going to have a gradual transition.

          And they did tell us about this many months ago.

          • tiddy@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            I hate to say but technically collecting statistics is non-anonymous identifiable tracking, especially in this age where theres so many datasets companies can coorelate them to

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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            4 hours ago

            Hahaha, because data can never be de-anonymised, right?

            Oh, yea, that’s repeatedly been show to not be true.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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          4 hours ago

          Didn’t we go through all this like a month ago?

          Why are people still excusing Mozilla for this?

    • pipariturbiini@sopuli.xyz
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      13 hours ago

      I dislike ads as much as the next person, and find uBlock Origin necessary for browsing the web, but the cold fact is that the internet is run with advertising, whether you like it or not.

      If that is done without creating a profile on me, and without crippling the reading/viewing experience, I can tolerate advertisement.

      I assume this is also an action towards becoming independent from Google funding; which is a good thing.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        Fuck ads.

        You’re lying to yourself if you think ads will ever be delivered without tracking.

        This whole “anonymization” nonsense is a lie. It’s been shown, repeatedly, that data can be de-anonymised, especially data that’s not exactly narrowly collected.

      • mnmalst@lemmy.zip
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        12 hours ago

        Happy to see some sane comments here. Couldn’t have said it better. You can hate ads and still keep a foot in reality.

      • kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 hours ago

        I absolute despise ads but they are a necessary evil, it can be implemented well if it is not done intrusive and doesn’t take up more space then the content it self. Also if it are mostly scam ads and such they might as well not have ads at all.

  • flappy@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    So banning ublock origin lite from the addon store was malice, after all?

    That means they will drop MV2 as soon as Chrome ends the business/legacy support, since they were the alternative.