Before you get really upset about this thread, you should read this other one: https://federate.social/@jik/112779924411100427
I’m not thrilled about this by any means, but what Firefox is doing is not what chrome is doing (which is what the op posted thread is claiming). Conflating them serves no one.
Can we please stop linking mastodon threads? Mozilla literally has an explainer article. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
People pissed at Firefox might not be as receptive of an article straight from Mozilla. Know your audience.
Would you rather get second hand information or would you rather get the technical specifications from the horse’s mouth?
I’d rather have both, and ideally a third by someone who has actually looked at the code to verify claims.
You completely ignored the point of the person you’re replying to
It’s pretty painful how quickly wrong information spreads. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but that doesn’t really make it better…
Even in this actual thread, under the comment you replied to, someone stills thinks that Mozilla is placing ads.
I can say confidently that even if you don’t conflate the two; the Mozilla implementation can be broken and abused just as easily as the Google one can be.
Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)
Or am I missing something about the process?
The advertiser’s don’t place the ads themselves. They say where and when they are placed, but the actual placing/integration is done by the likes of Google, Facebook, and, in this case, Mozilla.
That’s the “third party” that’s doing the tracking.
That’s not accurate. Mozilla isn’t placing the ads. Mozilla is storing impressions and then collating a privacy protecting report so that advertisers see that their ads are working, but not revealing information about the users to the advertisers. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
But it says “without sending information about you”
And none of the outraged people has actually described how information about you would actually be known to advertisers, so I don’t see why people assume it will be.
Right riiight
That doesn’t sound bad at all!
Yup, it’s basically what I’ve been pushing for and what I hoped Brave would do when they launched. We’re always going to have ads, and browsers are in a position to make those as privacy-friendly as possible. Give advertisers only as much as they need (total views and clicks, and related, aggregated data), not what they want (individual tracking, “engagement” metrics like mouse movements, etc).
I’ll always hate ads, but I might be willing to disable my ad blocker if the ads respect my privacy and the content on the page is good.
I’m gonna start my own browser, with blackjack, and hookers
Is there a way to disable it on mobile? I have not seen anything yet.
It’s not on mobile yet, it’s only on specific websites, and as I understand it, it doesn’t even do anything unless you click an ad.
Which is completely different from Chrome’s system, which sends information about you to websites regardless - and they haven’t even fenced off third-party cookies yet!
It’s not on for me…
I can already see how Advertisers AND Websites will collude and break this one.
- Specifically placed ads; targeted at specific website pages which a majority of their target grouping will visit.
- Generate an ad that will specifically reside on a page deep inside of the site; think 4+ clicks deep; which is intensely personalized to their target. 1
- Ad will trigger; register “Impression” and be boxed up into Differential Privacy set by the DAP.
- Since that’s the only ad targeted for that specific page, any impression is an answer of 1 or ‘True’.
- Through microtargeting of these deep pages they can learn a lot about what people do online and could potentially break Differential Privacy.
1 - In this example the URI being targeted could be something like
https://www.example.com/zhuli/do/the/*in such a way that when you visithttps://example.com/zhuli/do/the/thing/order.phpis always recorded.https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap#name-security-considerations
In theory this could be defeated easily if a fork of Firefox wanted to send lots of noise or someone decided to emulate many Firefox clients with false information.
Fun fact: For me (newest nightly in Germany) it’s not only unchecked, it’s also greyed out.
What’s the deal with Firefox mobile (Android)? Couldn’t see the setting.
I already turned it off without asking Firefox
LibreWolf is the answer to your troubles.
