Firefox enables user tracking
mstdn.social
... I mean, WTF. Mozilla, you had one job ...
Edit:
Just to add a few remarks from the discussions below:
- As long as Firefox is sponsored by 'we are not a monopoly' Google, they can provide good things for users. Once advertisement becomes a real revenue stream for Mozilla, the Enshittification will start.
- For me it is crossing the line when your browser is spying on you and if 'we' accept it, Mozilla will walk down this path.
- This will only be an additional data point for companies spying on you, it will replace none of the existing methodologies. Learn about fingerprinting for example
- Mozilla needs to make money/find a business model, agreed. Selling you out to advertisement companies cannot be it.
- This is a very transparent attempt of Mozilla to be the man in the middle selling ads, despite the story they tell. At that point I can just use Chrome, Edge or Safari, at least Google has expertise and the money to protect my data and sadly Chrome is the most compatible browser (no fault of Mozilla/Firefox of course).
- Mozilla massively acts against the interests of their little remaining user base, which is another dumb move made by a leadership team earning millions while kicking out developers and makes me wonder what will be next.
The way it works is supposed to anonymously allow the measuring of advertising performance. Which ads do well with which kinds of users. Instead of tracking each individual user this tracks context, meaning what site the ad was seen on etc. Thereby providing a way to know what kinds of ads work with what kinds of users without profiling every individual in the world.
That is what it's supposed to do. Data still goes to an allegedly "trusted third party" (let's encrypt, apparently) which then does this anonymization.
The idea is a lot less egregious, but it's still only a good idea assuming you agree ads would be a good and ethical way to make the internet go round, if only they weren't profiling everyone. I don't.
Yeah the title of the post makes it sound much worse than what it seems to be in practice? Maybe I'm just naive
I think this a problem with applications with a privacy focused user basis. It becomes very black and white where any type of information being sent somewhere is bad. I respect that some people have that opinion and more power to them, but being pragmatic about this is important. I personally disabled this flag, and I recognize how this is edging into a risky area, but I also recognize that the Mozilla CTO is somewhat correct and if we have the option between a browser that blocks everything and one that is privacy-preserving (where users can still opt for the former), businesses are more likely to adopt the privacy-preserving standards and that benefits the vast majority of users.
Privacy is a scale. I'm all onboard with Firefox, I block tons of trackers and ads, I'm even somebody who uses NoScript and suffers the ramifications to due to ideology reasons, but I also enable telemetry in Firefox because I trust that usage metrics will benefit the product.
This is after they bought an ad company last month, Mozilla is compromised now
Edit: Somebody pointed out the reason: Mozilla Foundation has no members. It's just the executives, no one in the actual community has any input in Mozilla's direction, and considering how wildly out of touch tech executives are this explains it all
A bunch of Firefox devs need to leave Mozilla, fork it and start up an actual non-profit not based around monetization. I would happily donate monthly if I knew it were going to Firefox development, instead of the dozen other things Mozilla spends its money on. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Proton did something similar.
This poll shows promise: https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/112654592627487236
I think I would pay for a proton browser as well, if it isn’t just chromium. 5$ a month seems reasonable, but I am more the pay 250$ for lifetime type 😄
You’re definitely not alone. If this happens and it becomes some major news in the community with reasonable visibility, I’m sure many people would support this.
All of these claims clash with the reality of so many core open source projects, used by private users and massive corporations alike, that rely on single voluntary developers or super small groups which receive no flowers and no donations.
In general I agree: Open source projects are super hard to monetize and too much work does not get donations, flowers or even thanks.
For Firefox specifically I am not so sure, especially when Thunderbird seems to be doing good with their donation based model.
As long as Firefox is run by Mozilla throwing millions at their incompetent leadership, I will not donate a cent to Firefox.
If Firefox would get forked by some developers I'll happily donate money to them and given Firefox high visibility/importance, this might work out, like Thunderbird did.
There are some Firefox forks, but they tend to get outdated.. / have slow update cycles
I like floorp
yea. but they get to claim like they fund the opensource world. like come on… stop posting fake funding claims on an anonymous forum and hire yourself a developer team if you're so invested in this.
But whaa… developers salary aren't funded by your $2 dollar donations, even with 100s of donations. oh geez… who woulda thought.
Is Librewolf already a Firefox without ad companies colonization ?
LibreWolf is little more than a custom config for Firefox, they don't do actual development on the engine, which is the important and very technically laborious part.
In the meantime you can give a look to the Servo project. If Servo is clean for you, you can support them.
This is misinformation. The setting in question is not a "privacy breach setting," it's to use a new API which, for sites that use it, sends advertisers anonymized data about related ad clicks instead of the much more privacy-breaching tracking data that they normally collect. This is only a good thing for users, which is why the setting is automatically checked.
It's illegal in Europe to have an opt-out checked by default, must be an opt-in unchecked by default. This is one of the reason that Microsoft has always troubles in Europe about privacy and opt-out services.
That only applies to personally-identifiable information.
In the EU*
Sorry to be pedantic, but the UK, Swiss etc. are all in Europe but not in the legislative region where this law applies.
This even gets some people confused thinking those countries “aren't in Europe”, which is why I wanted to correct this.
If it is truly anonymized then it isn't protected under GDPR.
Which should tell you a lot; if Mozilla wasn’t confident about their anonymisation efforts their lawyers would not have allowed checked-by-default.
This does not prevent regular ad tracking, this provides additional data to advertisers. It also means Mozilla is now tracking me, and then Mozilla does this "anonymizing" on their servers. I do not trust Mozilla with this data, and I don't trust that no way can be found de-anonymize or combine this data with other data ad networks already collect.
This is not in my interest at all. This data should not be collected. The ad networks can suck it, why should I help them?
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
Advertisers can already easily get this data without this setting, and any measures you take to block ads also by definition affect this setting.
Meanwhile, if this works and becomes widely available, regulators will be able to take measures against user surveillance without having to succumb to the ad industry's argument that they won't know whether their ads work.
And yes, this provides data to advertisers, but it's data about their ads, not about users.
Ah yes, the hypothetical second step, in which tracking is going to be outlawed (I'm not holding my breath), except, of course, for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will "sell" (literal quote) the aggregate data, so I guess these are by semantic sophistry not adtech companies but something else.
I'm so glad this genius "plan" can be used to justify Mozilla funneling data to adtech firms right now, because in some hypothetical future timeline this somehow can be construed with a bunch of hand-waving and misdirection to be in my interest.
How about instead we have a browser that only cares about the users, and not give a fuck about adtech? Its number one goal should be to treat adtech as hostile, and fight to ruin that whole industry.
You're saying you're literally quoting the ISRG as planning to sell the data? Because that goes directly against what I've read about this, which I believe says that they wouldn't even be able to because they can't see the data.
Ok, I misremembered it says "pay" for the aggregate results, not sell.
So it doesn't say ISRG is going sell data, but the "full solution" will have other operators that get payed, i.e. they're going to sell the aggregate data. Also, they envision multiple such operators, all of which it seems need to be "trusted".
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment#end-user-benefit
Ah gotcha, thanks for bringing in the source - that does come down to the ISRG selling it. The thing I'd missed in your quote is that it's referring to aggregate data. So yeah, how that meshes with what I've read is that the ISRG won't be able to view user data, but indeed the ad performance data would be sold to advertisers.
What do you want? A Mozilla with no income? Because then there is no libre browser.
Can you imagine a world where Linux wasn't directly getting paid by Amazon to hook all your machines up to AWS? You can't! And how could vim possibly be developed without dropbox integration and sponsorship, that would never work. There is no way a world exists where Krita doesn't sell all your drawings to OpenAI, how are they going to make any money?
None of these nice things could exist if they weren't selling out their users, that's just reality.
Yes I get your point. Some software can run without a large income stream, on a volunteer basis.
You’re using that fact to say that Firefox also can. And if you care to look at my profile you’ll see I’ve argued time and time again that Mozilla is an overblown organisation and should be slimmed down to a couple of hundred, working solely on the browser.
I doubt, however, that you can build a modern, up-to-date browser on a volunteer basis.
How many full-time people do you think it takes?
Linux has full time developers. Blender has full time developers. Lots of other projects have full time developers. They still don't sell my data to Google.
A web browser is a very visible piece of software, relied upon by end users, businesses and governments alike. I'm sure enough people and organizations would donate their time and money to fund this, if it existed.
... No, it does not. The ads are currently already tracking clicks and conversions, on top of a whole boatload of other personal data. This API instead provides them with just the click and conversion data, divorced from the personal data and then aggregated with all the other site visitors.
Being against this proposal basically means you trust random websites and ad companies more with your data then you do Mozilla and LetsEncrypt.
Instead of what? As I said, this is in addition to existing tracking, with some vague promise that if current tracking methods were banned or abandoned, this could be used instead. Except it's not getting banned (Mozilla is not going to out-lobby Google) or abandoned (market forces prevent that), and why oh why would I want some alternative way for ad companies to get my data in that situation anyway? Let them die.
Now if another person is going to repeat this nonsense talking point, which you have picked up strait from Mozilla's corporate PR, I'm going to lose my mind. Have some critical thinking skills. They are giving away your data right now and they give you nothing in return except a nonsense promise of a fairytale future.
Please I just want a browser that acts in the user's interest only, does not work with Meta on adtech, and does not think it's their duty to save the ad industry from itself.
Again, no, that's not true. This API is only used by sites that opt into it, and in so doing, they are disabling the normal tracking which is far more invasive.
Sorry but where does it say they will disable "normal tracking" if they use this API?
In the entire pitch, the announcement, this clarification, and all the technical data? Read literally any of it again and you'll see that this is the whole point of the API.
You are missing the point. websites WILL NOT STOP TRACKING YOU! Nothing in this API can do that.
Where does it say that? How would this be enforced?
It's enforced by the websites, they opt into this API. It says that everywhere you can read about this.
I can't find this in the announcements and stuff. Where does it say that exactly?
https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment
Check out the second and third paragraphs in particular.
This initial implementation is just to test the actual API, so I don't believe sites using it will be blocking the other tracking yet, but once this API is tested and starts to see adoption, the goal is replacing tracking with this anonymized attribution.
You said:
OK, your source for this:
Nowhere does it say websites are disabling other tracking methods.
It says that browsers could (maybe, in the future) restrict other methods of tracking, if this gets widespread mainstream adoption. Why are these things related exactly? Mozilla could presumably implement these tracking restrictions right now. The reason they are related in the minds and PR of Mozilla drones is that they don't dare do this without providing an alternative for the ad industry. Their corporate overlords won't "allow" it.
But right now, this restricts and replaces nothing, they literally are giving you vague promises about future improvements, while already collecting your data, like I said.
I will remind you that you accused others of spreading misinformation in this thread. I will accept your little mea culpa song and dance now. Gimme!
... first of all, providing a new API to give out information about me is not a good thing in my mind.
Second, this would be the first time in human history, the advertisers would not simply add that APIs information to everything else they aggregate including fingerprinting of your browser.
So, serious question: How is this good for me?
Edit: typo
It does not collect any more information about you. It provides far less information than pretty much every ad is already collecting, and that information is anonymized. It does not affect ad blocking solutions.
So, serious question: what are you not understanding here?
... as already mentioned above:
This will be just an additional data point about you sold out - no advertiser will dial back on all the other ways to collect data about you.
Mozilla shows that it willingly and silently will sell your data out and they will increase this over time to make money/try to be the man in the middle.
It does not matter at all if it affects ad blocking solutions, this is about tracking and profiling. Learn about browser fingerprinting and other techniques.
This is built in to your browser, which is crossing a very important line.
Are you trying to tell me that the host server is showing the ad, because last I checked, with my whitelist firewall, I never see ads because all ads are links to the ad server you are actually visiting. It is no different than opening up the webpage and connection to them. They get all the same fingerprinting info.
I'm not saying one way or another here, but there is no such thing as anonymous data collection. It only takes 2-3 unique identifiers to connect a person between a known and anonymous data set and there are almost always quite a few more unique identifiers than this in any given dataset. When I hear anyone say stalkerware is anonymous, I assume they are no longer just a privateer of a foreign drug cartel level state, instead they are full blown slave trader pirates fit for the gallows or worse.
... No, I'm saying that a given site hosts the specific instance of an ad. That site has control over what the ad can harvest, and if they're opting in to this PPA API, that information will be anonymized and much more limited than it currently is.
People should just use LibreWolf at this point
Be careful what you wish for. Firefox needs income and without audience for Firefox, Firefox is no more and then LibreWolf is no more.
But Firefox is open source, though. It's not going to disappear just like that.
@laughterlaughter @sunbeam60 Yeah Palemoon web-browser still exists forked off from a very old Firefox...
I think Mozilla could find another way of getting profit without without tracking its users or depending on Google's funding.
I wish they had a mobile app!
I've enjoyed Mull as an Android alternative https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix
A Word About Private Attribution in Firefox, by the Firefox CTO.
The original mastodon post was with more details, and some drama, but the guy is trying to spam this link everywhere he can. so desperate for attention. lol
I think it’s a valid news to spread here.
Ok idealist.
What is your alternative funding stream for Mozilla?
It's bad.
Is it worse than the advertising owned browser that gives your information directly to said advertiser?
How does KDE do it with Konqueror?
They don't. They rely entirely on donations (and sponsorship donations). It also mean, they have less resources to maintain and develop their software, ESPECIALLY Conqueror since it's not as much well-maintained compared to other parts of the KDE software suite. Plus, Firefox do maintain their own web-engine, while KDE just use the WebKit one, so even more reasons that Firefox can't substain with the resources KDE currently has.
Thanks for explaining.
Konqueror is dead since years.
That's a shame.
I used to say the same, but now I wonder if they need as much as they have?
I am genuinely curious. There have been a lot of threads like this full of criticism for not spending enough on the browser.
It seems the browser is plenty funded, so maybe the org and co have too much and are in search of where to spend it?
Maybe it's just the company with too much and the org is still struggling?
I mean, that argument starts to wade in to the Mozilla foundation as a whole, and what their purpose is, and that's a giant kettle of fish.
Theoretical game. They lowball Google on how much Google pays them. How do people react? I don't see them doing that and say, "Man, I'm glad Firefox is reducing Google's influence over them". I see them making a thread about how Firefox is giving Google a discounted rate because they're all corrupt technofacists.
The core problem there still exists IMO. Funding.
What we really need is a reasonable way for open source, free, software, that exists for the good of the whole, to get money. But that has it's own kettle of fish, where does it come from, how big is big enough to get some, what if they charge for support, how open is open enough.
Something something, seize the means of production, communism, etc.
Fair question. First move for Mozilla: Fire the whole fucking leadership team and use the millions saved for some more developers working on Firefox. That should finance the next 2 years, afterwards we can think about next steps. :-P
Safari too: https://clearcode.cc/blog/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-explained/
This was a webkit proposal from 2019: https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/
And it has been a W3C draft since 2021: https://privacycg.github.io/private-click-measurement/
Just switched to LibreWolf/Mull + KeePassXC/KeePass2Android
No bitwarden?
Wouldn't need bitwarden if they're using keepassxc
So you didn't care reading up what PPA is, eh?
But yeah I agree with the toot, we need more browsers heck even more browser engines to not end with just one engine controlled by fucking Google.
"Firefox is just another US-corporate product with an 'open source' sticker on it."
unlike EU-corporate products
But what are real alternatives that ...
Librewolf, Waterfox, Mullvad, Floorp...
These are all Firefox forks. If Firefox is done, they're done.
Firefox is not done. It just became spyware, but all the forks can still benefit from FOSS license of Firefox. In the same manner as Vivaldi or Brave or Ungoogled chromium etc.
@Dirk
@FuckyWucky
Librewolf Browser? I dont know if it support MV2 and MV3
@Dirk
@FuckyWucky
But working fine for my usecases
anyone who cares about privacy is running ublock and/or umatrix anyway so it's negated.
This helps you not seeing ads, it does not help you being tracked.
What?
uBO absolutely helps against tracking. It is at least half of its reason for existing.
The two primary lists are an (1) an ad block list (2) an anti-tracking list.
And used in medium or hard mode uBO categorically blocks many methods of tracking.
But also, if you use Firefox, this is layered on top of Enhanced tracking protection, blocking of 3p tracking cookies, and total cookie protection (dfpi)
Kinda, we're all a little confused here.
uBlock will stop websites from tracking you.
uBlock will not stop your browser from tracking you
That’s true, but this feature doesn't involve your browser tracking you or profiling you. It only relates to anttribution. And if you don’t trust that, it’s an easy 1-click opt out.
There is a good high level explainer here: https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/mozilla-ppa/
waterfox rocks btw
Librerfox is even better!
Bye, bye Firefox!
This is why I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever browser works better in my pc/sbc (brave) followed by a network ad-blocker solution (nextdns).
Way to go. Does this solution help with fingerprinting/tracking?
He kinda said he doesn't care lol
He prolly got nothing to hide anyway
I've no idea, honestly. Does it gives me more free time to worry about more important stuff however that will (very likely) not be changed over time by money-hungry developers with false promises of unachievable anonymity and/or privacy in their applications? That I can guarantee a reasonable YES.