Firefox 128 Criticized for Including Small Test of 'Privacy-Preserving' Ad Tech by Default (itsfoss.com) 57
"Many people over the past few days have been lashing out at Mozilla," writes the blog Its FOSS, "for enabling Privacy-Preserving Attribution by default on Firefox 128, and the lack of publicity surrounding its introduction."
Mozilla responded that the feature will only run "on a few sites in the U.S. under strict supervision" — adding that users can disable it at any time ("because this is a test"), and that it's only even enabled if telemetry is also enabled.
And they also emphasize that it's "not tracking." The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions — again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users. (And Mozilla says that aggregated summary even includes "noise that provides differential privacy.") This Privacy-Preserving Attribution concept "does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone... Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising."
More from It's FOSS: Even though Mozilla mentioned that PPA would be enabled by default on Firefox 128 in a few of its past blog posts, they failed to communicate this decision clearly, to a wider audience... In response to the public outcry, Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to step in to clarify what was going on.
He started with how the internet has become a massive cesspool of surveillance, and doing something about it was the primary reason many people are part of Mozilla. He then expanded on their approach with Firefox, which, historically speaking, has been to ship a browser with anti-tracking features baked in to tackle the most common surveillance techniques. But, there were two limitations with this approach. One was that advertisers would try to bypass these countermeasures. The second, most users just accept the default options that they are shown...
Bas Schouten, Principal Software Engineer at Mozilla, made it clear at the end of a heated Mastodon thread that "[opt-in features are] making privacy a privilege for the people that work to inform and educate themselves on the topic. People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default.
"If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this."
This has already provoked a discussion among Slashdot readers. "It doesn't seem that evil to me," argues Slashdot reader geekprime. "Seems like the elimination of cross site cookies is a privacy enhancing idea." (They cite Mozilla's statement that their goal is "to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.")
But Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?"
Mozilla has provided simple instructions for disabling the feature:
Mozilla responded that the feature will only run "on a few sites in the U.S. under strict supervision" — adding that users can disable it at any time ("because this is a test"), and that it's only even enabled if telemetry is also enabled.
And they also emphasize that it's "not tracking." The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions — again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users. (And Mozilla says that aggregated summary even includes "noise that provides differential privacy.") This Privacy-Preserving Attribution concept "does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone... Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising."
More from It's FOSS: Even though Mozilla mentioned that PPA would be enabled by default on Firefox 128 in a few of its past blog posts, they failed to communicate this decision clearly, to a wider audience... In response to the public outcry, Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to step in to clarify what was going on.
He started with how the internet has become a massive cesspool of surveillance, and doing something about it was the primary reason many people are part of Mozilla. He then expanded on their approach with Firefox, which, historically speaking, has been to ship a browser with anti-tracking features baked in to tackle the most common surveillance techniques. But, there were two limitations with this approach. One was that advertisers would try to bypass these countermeasures. The second, most users just accept the default options that they are shown...
Bas Schouten, Principal Software Engineer at Mozilla, made it clear at the end of a heated Mastodon thread that "[opt-in features are] making privacy a privilege for the people that work to inform and educate themselves on the topic. People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default.
"If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this."
This has already provoked a discussion among Slashdot readers. "It doesn't seem that evil to me," argues Slashdot reader geekprime. "Seems like the elimination of cross site cookies is a privacy enhancing idea." (They cite Mozilla's statement that their goal is "to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.")
But Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?"
Mozilla has provided simple instructions for disabling the feature:
- Click the menu button and select Settings.
- In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section.
- Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.
Is this feature a NOP? (Score:3)
Would this even do anything if you had Ublock Origin installed?
Re:Is this feature a NOP? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is that the vast amount of web users don't use ublock, or even adblock. By DEFAULT people get little to no privacy, and most don't have the knowledge to improve it. The idea to change the default to privide a little bit more privacy seems good on the surface, even if you or I won't make use of it because we turned up our privacy to 11.
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Firefox asks you what privacy settings you want when you first run it, so every user is forced to choose between standard and strict. The latter limits cookies and a few other things.
The criticism of the new privacy preserving ad-tech has been mostly unfair. People don't seem to understand what it is or what it does. Like it or not, the internet is built on ads. While you may find it acceptable to burn most of it down and go back to personal ad-free pages, most people don't. There would be legal issues if a
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Like it or not, the internet is built on ads.
Anyone who thinks the browser maker should cater to advertisers can just use Google Chrome. Mozilla's "our users are too stupid so we make the decision for them" is completely tone-deaf.
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It's not catering to the advertisers, it's catering to the users who like having lots of free websites to use.
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That's psychopath talk, lady. "You wouldn't want the free web to go away, would you, so we've decided you are going to give advertisers some more information."
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The point is that it gives advertisers far, far less information. I don't know where this myth that it gives them more info comes from, the entire point of it is to reduce the amount of data they have access to.
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No, that's spin. It gives them more information. It gives them what they take now plus what Firefox gives them. This does nothing to reduce the information that advertisers get by doing their own tracking. If Firefox makes some forms of tracking impossible, it still gives advertisers more information: "What they get now - what they lose through anti-tracking + what Mozilla gives them" is strictly more than "what they get now - what they lose through anti-tracking".
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You clearly have no idea what this feature is.
It's gone from a web request from your computer at the time you saw the ad, with cookies, to an aggregated "N people saw this add between these two dates".
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They get what they get now and then what Mozilla decides to give them. It does not reduce anything. It does not matter one bit how much they give them, because it's always extra on top of what the advertisers would get without it. If they make this a standard, most people, the people who use Chrome, will have their data collected by bloody Google. Mozilla is being complicit in that. DO NOT ESTABLISH DATA COLLECTION AS A TOLERABLE NORMAL.
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This is just mindless paranoia. Firefox is open source, if you wanted to know you could go look at the code.
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WTF are you talking about. Mozilla collects data and gives information to advertisers. They're not denying it. They (and you) are saying it's harmless, but the fact that they do is not in question.
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So, this is news to me. I hadn't realized browsers themselves were sending data off to unknown servers; Apple and Google, yes because they're for-profit-first companies. But Mozilla still lists itself as a non-profit. This aggregation of data, by any browser, doesn't seem to affect the number or types or quality of ads, so it should not affect the availability of "free" web sites.
I had originally assumed Mozilla was going from the Google style to a new style, as opposed to already having no aggregation?
Re: (Score:2)
Mozilla have designated another company to run the server, and claim they don't have access to it. You really have to trust them in any case, since they are also responsible for vetting certificate authorities that Firefox trusts, and for pushing binary updates. Well, I suppose you could do all that manually, but nobody does.
I think they probably did that because people excrete a brick when any data is sent to a browser vendor.
They are working towards what you want. Simpler ads without tracking. This step a
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This is less privacy, not more. The sites track you any way they can. This does not change that, and now the browser collects data on your habits too. What you need to understand is that it is the browser maker that collects that data, and the maker of the most-used browser is who? If you want a rule of thumb for deciding if something is a good thing for the user, ask yourself if doing it helps an advertisers. If it does, you should not do it. Mozilla's statement that this informs sites about ad performance
Time to move on (Score:2, Interesting)
Between the occasional 10-minute startup when it gets a profile issue and the general direction they're heading in... I rebuilt a home system yesterday and went with Brave instead of Firefox.
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Tell me you have no fucking clue of what you are talking about, without telling me you have no clue of what you are talking about.
Brave is :
- It's history show nothing wrong, they tried concept and did research and developpement just like any others business, and backtracked for all the changes that their users base didn't like.
- It is not private, it is Open source
- Built and based on Chromium
- Have a system to allow you to encourage your webmaster, your content creator by sending them tips, without gettin
When will companies and groups learn? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Except the current default is less privacy. Reducing ad based tracking should not be opt-in! This is what advertisers want, because most users stick with the defaults; advertisers want the default to be a a privacy free world.
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No tracking, is that so hard to understand?
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But you have that now. The default now is that everything tracks you. You can if you like opt-out and use adblock. Most people in the world however do not use adblock, because most of the world is not technologically adept. The default right now is bad, the proposed experiment is ever so slightly less bad.
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Geez man, some people are slow to understand that privacy is NOT a priviledge but it is a RIGHT.
They need to make it an opt-in process, in every possible aspect.
What the next stupidity... ads at the maternity room or maybe tattoo your new born with an ads ? :
"Do you want to pay 10,000.00$ to have your new born taken care of, or would you like to pay 6,000.00$ and have him a face tattoo with a popular burger brand" .......
What the fuck is wrong with you people.....
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There is an alternative that doesn't track you at all. It's quite simple for website operators to set up, and it involves...
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Apple devices require you to opt in (Score:2)
It's just like how mobile gaming doesn't work without predatory microtransactions. There are some business models that don't function without evil. Internet advertising is one of them because it's too easy to ignore the ads.
As for Apple keep in mind they're not doing this out of the kindness of their heart, there are meg
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Companies will learn when greed and stupidity stop being the driving forces. Does not look like it will happen soon.
In other news, I now need to look for another reserve browser because the Firefox people have completely lost it. What a fail.
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Firefox is Google in all but name, the developers are frequently committing to both projects.
Citation requested.
Wow, The Universe keeps coming full-circle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Once, there was Internet Explorer and its swift, secure, standards-based Netscape Navigator (oh, and Lynx - but that doesn't count). Firefox followed with a promise to return to the clean, lightweight path of minimal bloat.
That didn't last. Chrome came because Firefox fell from the true path; now Google's browser is even worse than Insecure Exploder ever was - and Netscrape's glory has faded into what is now Firefox (bloated and no longer trustworthy) and Chrome (bloated and no longer trustworthy, if ever it was).
Now, it's Brave or the DuckDuckGo browser - or at least the DDG extension for Chrome (is there one for FF? I didn't check) - with the truly paranoid among us using the TOR browser (Firefox modified to be safe 'n' secure as provided, it's assumed you know what you're doing). Oh, and Opera for those of us who want to pretend we're running IOS and its (infamous) Safari browser (no, they're not at all alike; but they look nearly identical to an old UNIX engineer with virtually no MS-Windows or IOS experience to speak of).
Chrome came because Google (Score:3)
Browsers you're talking about are all well and good but you're ignoring that Google by making Chrome as well as spending the money to make it viable in the Enterprise and schools becomes a major player in internet standards.
I've set it before and I'll say i
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Now, it's Brave or the DuckDuckGo browser
Don't you know, Brave has been doing what Firefox just introduced, almost since the beginning of Brave. Don't take my word for it, they discuss it openly. https://ads-help.brave.com/ [brave.com]
Introduction to Brave Ads
Brave Ads are first-party ad placements available throughout Brave, the privacy-first Web browser and Brave Search, the world's fastest growing independent search engine.
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Y'know, I only glanced at Brave when I first became aware of it. Seeing it was just a Chrome fork (or clearly something like that), I dropped it like a rock. I do use Chrome (I'm running on a Chromebook), but I have the DDG extension installed. I use TOR for anonymization (sparingly, I have surprisingly few valid privacy concerns in most of my day-to-day web browsing), and at my age I don't even bother with porn or online casinos. I'm pretty unconcerned about my web privacy.
I have taken to doing all my
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Chrome came into existence because Firefox's code was a complete mess and would need major re-architecting to add some very important performance and security features - namely per tab process isolation and a much faster Javascript engine.
So Google went with KHTML/Webkit, and eventually forked it into Blink because the bloat of supporting older stuff was holding them back.
Firefox today is much faster and leaner than it used to be. Compare it with something like Pale Moon that is basically a continuation of
Brave does it too (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Firefox Mobile (Score:5, Informative)
It's also enabled by default on Firefox Mobile (on Android). Turning it off is rather more annoying because you have to:
- Navigate to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
- Toggle general.aboutConfig.enable to true
- Now you can navigate to the newly enabled about:config
- Toggle dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false
Not enabled on iOS because it's just a Safari shell.
Safari has it too! (Score:2)
Speaking of Safari, it also has this annoying feature since 2021 as shown in https://federate.social/@dmart... [federate.social]. :(
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How about having no risk at all? Who the fuck does mozilla think they're working for?
Mozilla knows full well that they're working for Google, the company which gives them most of their funding. Mozilla provides Google with plausible deniability, while simultaneously turning up the heat on the 'say no to advertising' frogs that still remain in the Firefox pot.
it's only enabled if telemetry is also enabled (Score:5, Informative)
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The Mozilla CEO said that was a UI issue that they will fix in a newer version of Firefox. Telemetry being disabled does prevent the feature from being used.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]
The UI fix should be hitting beta, nightly, and 128.1esr.
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Same. I didn't see this article until just now and I have all that shit turned off already, and this was enabled.
While you are there (Score:4, Informative)
You might find some other things in the Privacy and Security settings you want to disable...
If the want to conduct research ethically... (Score:3)
Why is Mozilla doing this? (Score:3, Interesting)
People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default.
"If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this."
If Mozilla wants privacy by default, then why not include an ad-blocker and enable it by default. Why is Mozilla trying to appease the enemy?
Websites would block Firefox (Score:2)
If Mozilla wants privacy by default, then why not include an ad-blocker and enable it by default. Why is Mozilla trying to appease the enemy?
Because the alternative is what Skype did for several years: "Please download Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to use this web application."
It's not tracking ... (Score:3)
The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions — again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users.
Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?"
Exactly. They'll just track you *and* used the aggregated data.
Personally, I seriously can't imagine browsing w/o using uBO anymore. The few times I've done so, usually to test something I've reported to Bugzilla, using a clean profile have been painful.
Ad company now (Score:2)
Mozilla partnered with adMarketplace, they are naturally incentivised to assist, otherwise why partner?
Icecat looks cool though.
DNT by default gets disregarded (Score:2)
If that's the case then why aren't all of Firefox's privacy features enabled by default? Why isn't "Tell web sites not to sell or share my data" (Global Privacy Control) ticked by default?
Firefox does not enable DNT by default for two reasons. One is that when a major web browser enabled DNT by default in 2012, website operators announced plans to disregard DNT from that browser [arstechnica.com]. Another is that websites' fingerprinting algorithms can use presence of DNT as an additional data point [stackexchange.com].
If that's the case then why can't "DNS over HTTPS" ever be disabled (properly)
Settings > Privacy & Security > DNS over HTTPS > Off
Stop selling my personal data (Score:1)
Mixed Opinions (Score:2)
I've of mixed opinions on this. Mozilla is in desperate need of revenue, and is the only major browser that is trying to preserve a Free web. If it can bring in ad revenue without compromising our privacy, then I am on board with it.