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jwz three months ago: Mozilla is an advertising company now
From the comments:
Preemptive subtwit.
Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
Mozilla has been financed by ads since 20 years. This pays the people working on the browser. 99% of the work is actually done by employees, not by volunteers. Acquiring that advertising company is the next logical step to get rid of Google (also financed by ads…) Instead of blaming shaming, we need to think about how to finance working on free software, as relying on unpaid work is not viable and brings issues with diversity.
You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”
Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text. That’s news. Literal news.
“Instead of blaming and shaming” – fuck that. I will absolutely and unapologetically blame them for the utter shame they bring on themselves.
Good. Opt-out is authoritarian dogshit, and should be illegal.
Dogshit, yes. Authoritarian, no. Word choice matters.
Opt-out is crepuscular nonsense!
It is opt-in if you have an adblocker.
Also it is anonymised info
Except Mozilla enables the telemetry by default and does not ship an ad blocker.
Also the data is not anonymized until after upload. You must trust Mozilla to do this. And I don’t know how much I trust Mozilla after they refused to announce this change to its users.
Firefox should really embrace minimalism
Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Mozilla has just bought into the narrative that the advertising industry has a right to track users by turning Firefox into an ad measurement tool. While Mozilla may have had good intentions, it is very unlikely that ‘privacy preserving attribution’ will replace cookies and other tracking tools. It is just a new, additional means of tracking users.”
Sigh… I cannot for the life of me figure how anyone could think that enabling PPA (even by default) means that advertising industry has somehow right to track folks. Like dude, the entire point of PPA is that advertisers could then get to know if/when their adverts are working without tracking people.
The argument that “It is just a new, additional means of tracking users” also doesn’t really make sense - even if we assume that this is new means of tracking. I mean, sure it technically is new addition, but it’s like infinity+1 is still infinity - it doesn’t make a difference. The magnitude of this one datapoint is about the same as addition of any new web api (I mean there are lots that shouldn’t exist - looking at you chromium… but that’s besides the point).
File a complaint over use of third-party cookies and actual tracking if you want to be useful - this complaint just makes you look like an idiot.
The argument that “It is just a new, additional means of tracking users” also doesn’t really make sense - even if we assume that this is new means of tracking.
It is a new means of tracking. It is extra telemetry provided by Mozilla to advertisement partners.
it doesn’t make a difference.
It makes a difference because Mozilla went out of its way to inject this tracking into a browser that is supposedly made for users.
It does not escape me, by the way, that Mozilla is now a de jure advertising corporation: since FakeSpot they’ve sold private data to third party advertisers, and since Anonym they’ve operated an advertising-specific wing.
Because of this this, Mozilla can no longer make any statements about online advertising without a huge conflict of interest, which they should disclose.
How do you think Mozilla was funded before Fakespot and Anonym were acquired?
I’m not a fan of Mozilla accepting money from Google, but it’s absolutely preferable to having a clause in their privacy policy that allows them to sell geolocation data directly to advertising partners. Pre-2023, I don’t think they did that.
And where did that Google money come from?
(It’s a rhetorical question of course: it came from Firefox users clicking on ads.)
This isn’t the first time a company funded its competitor to avoid monopoly accusations. Microsoft did it to Apple. So it’s not like Google is simply returning the wealth Mozilla is providing it out of some generosity. Maybe they are, but I find the desire to remain out of the clutches of regulators to be an equally compelling explanation.
And given the fact that (despite Mozilla’s best attempts to the contrary) Firefox users tend to be on the nerdy and privacy oriented side, and they have both the proclivity and capacity to block ads, I imagine that Google probably pulls from the revenue sucked out of Chrome users rather than Firefox ones. But that’s just a theory, a browser theory.
It’s conspiratorial that Google gets ad clicks through Firefox, and pays Mozilla some of the money it makes from that?
And I suppose it’s also conspiratorial to claim it’s doing the same for Safari users - instead it’s more likely that it’s paying Apple 20 billion a year to remain out of the clutches of regulators?
Language removed so I can elaborate:
I don’t believe Google sets aside the money made through Firefox exclusively for Firefox. (If you believe this is the case, good luck demonstrating it, I guess.) Google’s money probably goes into a big pool named “ad revenue”, and that pool is probably filled disproportionately with Google’s own Chrome users.
Again, Google is doing to Mozilla what Microsoft did for Apple: hurling money at them with the facade of an exchange of something, in order to stave off regulators.
Can someone TLDR this situation? Is this like 1/10th what Google does or is Firefox basically Chrome now?
The consequences for users of this thing in itself are fairly minimal for now. It’s the consequences for Mozilla which are something of a disaster.
I will copypaste, because this feature has been discussed a lot already.
The companies will get some general data if their ads work, without a profile about you being created. I am fine with that. Just imagine what a boon it would be for the “normal“ less tech savvy, if advertisers switched to a more privacy respecting technology like this. If more privacy focused people don’t like it, they can simply disable it by ticking one box, without negative consequences (unlike content blockers and similar techniques where a website can penalize you, turned off PPA is not detectable). It has no downsides as far as I am concerned. It doesn’t give advertisers additional data that they wouldn’t already be able to get, it just creates the option of measuring their ads in a privacy respecting way.
Discussion about PPA from some time ago
I am fine with that.
Okay, but I imagine that you being fine with it will have very little bearing on the decision of the Data Protection Authority as to whether or not it violates articles 5, 6, 12, and 13 of the GDPR.
Sure thing, never claimed to know if it violates the law. Thats for judges to decide.
To add to this, I’m not fine with this either. And I don’t think Mozilla should assume the consent of people, either.
