Repost from r/firefox:
Right. I’m getting tired of seeing people dump on Firefox and Mozilla about this thing in the release notes:
Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.
What is this? And why is it not something to get heated about?
Attribution is how advertisers know how to pay the right site owner when someone clicks on their ad. It’s important for ad-supported sites that clicks get attributed.
Right now, attribution is basically incompatible with protecting privacy. Advertisers use every method of tracking you can name, and some you can’t, to provide accurate attribution.
The Privacy Preserving Attribution API is an experimental way of informing an advertiser that someone clicked on an ad on a given site without leaking that it was you, specifically, who did that. Specifically, ads using the API ask Firefox to remember that they were seen, on what sites, and to what sites they lead. Then, when the user visits the destination site, the destination site asks Firefox to generate a report and submit it via a separate service that mixes your report with reports from other people and forwards these aggregated reports in large batches. Any traces that might be unique to you are lost in the crowd.
This is still experimental, being enabled by Mozilla on a site-by-site basis as developers request it. It’s not a free-for-all yet, and I can only find one entry on Bugzilla of a site who’s requested it.
If it’s such a great thing for users, why isn’t Mozilla shouting from the rooftops how they’ve improved things, instead of it being enabled automatically?
Because its not really ready yet, im sure theyll talk more about it once they get big websites on board
Wait, it’s not ready yet, so they enable it by default? That’s not how experimental feature development happens.
The feature is ready in the browser, but its not ready because no websites use it, thats what i meant
@Blisterexe I admire your patience.
You cant reason people out of positions they didnt reason themselves into i’m afraid
What you’re saying is that they’re not vaporwaring their feature while it’s still in beta, if I get you.
This is a positive, if so, and I hate Mozilla for what they did with … well, mozilla.exe .