For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default

1) Hamburger menu -> Settings -> Privacy & Security

2) scroll down to the new section entitled "Web Site Advertising Preferences".

3) Make sure the box marked "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" is not checked.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Found it. Go to settings, type privacy into the search box. The last item under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" is a check box labelled "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement".

It was already unchecked on mine when I looked just now.

Before anyone tries to respond with it. It is https://donorbox.org/ladybird

And fallback to Firefox when things don't work. Which is usually on sketchy websites, websites that have heavy bot protection and fingerprinting or ones that use gpu APIs.

1. Define some baseline set of M impressions with various ad identifiers and from various sybil advertisers.

2. For each target user, define some set of M marker impressions, also with various ad identifiers and from various and sybil advertisers.

3. Save all impressions (marker + baseline) on a bunch of sybil browsers to get above the reporting baseline with some probability.

4. If/when a target user visits a target website, request a conversion report for each ad/advertiser.

You now have a baseline signal (from the baseline ads/advertisers) and a marker signal (from the marker ads/advertisers). If this is one of your target users, you'd expect their "marker" signal signal to be stronger than the baseline.

Everything else is just agreeing with the advertising industry on their idea that profile-building is fine.

These advertisers nowadays think they have they are entitled to everything, and Firefox just helped them.

The value of words is leaving the web.

The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market".

Haven't you had enough?

https://kagi.com/orion/

Maybe check out Brave Browser, LibreWolf or Vivaldi.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40965161

...and probably a few I missed.

Opera? Other recommendations?

> This acquisition marks a significant step in addressing the urgent need for privacy-preserving advertising solutions. By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology, we can enhance user privacy and advertising effectiveness, leveling the playing field for all stakeholders.

I can only interpret this as the urgent need is money, and wants to sell its "scale and trusted reputation". Mozilla has been down this road before. It was not good for them.

> Anonym was founded with two core beliefs: First, that people have a fundamental right to privacy in online interactions and second, that digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and experiences. Mozilla and Anonym share the belief that advanced technologies can enable relevant and measurable advertising while still preserving user privacy.

This is some pretty weak wording for a press release. The economics of the situation are that advertising will always trump privacy. Researchers have successfully de-anonymized anonymised data sets, including medical records. Why would these data be any different?

> As we integrate Anonym into the Mozilla family, we are excited about the possibilities this partnership brings. While Anonym will continue to serve its customer base, together, we are poised to lead the industry toward a future where privacy and effective advertising go hand in hand, supporting a free and open internet.

Anonym’s customers are advertisers, right? The same people who for decades poured money into eroding that free and open internet that we had…

> About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.

Well, it seems Anonym, Smallwood and Mudd had a nice piece about them written in the Wall Street Journal [1]. From the second paragraph:

> Graham Mudd and Brad Smallwood each spent more than a decade building Meta’s advertising system, which allowed the company to offer granular data about how ad campaigns worked with individual users, often by tracking their web and mobile activity.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

[1] https://archive.is/17c0f#selection-5751.0-5751.246

I mean, let's imagine this works as explained -whatever, let's imagine it does and with no downsides even-. Now as far as I can understand this aggregate information ends up producing something like "this particular ad placed here ends up producing this number of conversions". Is this really something an advertiser wants to know? Maybe to some extent, but to me it sounds a lot more like something an advertising platform would want to know. Which is why I'm not surprised by Meta's interest.

To me this feels like a good tool to avoid paying small websites at all for just having ads. Impressions would be finally and completely discarded as something payable. Now for the ads on your site to earn you something at all you need conversions that you can now reliably track. For a site owner to be paid, they'd need to increase the CTR; they can't just "provide ad space", they have to work to earn clicks.

So maybe -probably- I'm way off here. Maybe someone can correct me. But as I see this, this tool seems very specifically made for the big advertising platforms.

Safari seems to be the only decent, privacy-focused browser left on the market.

Until the Ladybird arrives.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40959723

Since this is days old news with lots of discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 and more)

the more recent development is Firefox CTO posting thoughts: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247)

I can't wait for Ladybird to get good, in a decade realistically, swimming against a massive current of Google pushing its unstandardised nonsense on Chrome, and web developers jumping on the bandwagon, making web standards more and more complex by the day so no one ever is able to catch up.

You can add to the dead internet theory the fact that the Web is now maliciously impossible to recreate and access from scratch if you are unable to compete with the billions Google spend to maintain their hegemony. Heck, even Microsoft found it was more efficient to join Google rather than to try and direct what they laughably call "an open standard." There is more competition to build reusable space rockets than in web browsers.

A sad day, and sadder days await us. Shame of Mozilla, and on the CTO trying to sell this feature as a good thing.

Honestly I don't have much to add to the conversation. Mozilla made a bad move, Firefox's big thing was privacy and not being Chromium and it's lost the first thing.

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...

Because it's very confusing now.

Settings -> Advanced -> Allow Privacy-Preserving Measurement of Ad Effectiveness

More discussion among others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535

Does this new "privacy preserving attribution" feature respect multi-account containers? Or is it somehow not considered necessary, because it's meant to be less invasive than the tracking cookies it's supposed to replace? Call me skeptical for now.

I'm a happy user of multi-account containers, which lets me separate my cookie identities in Firefox. Before, I had to use different browsers for work and private, and yes, it solves this problem, but the best part is that I don't have to worry about tracking cookies, because they aren't tied to my personal accounts: In my experience, I can to a great extent escape the echo chamber I'm in, and the ads I see in it, by just deleting the cookies of my sacrificial default container.

Other than that, considering the status quo – that the web is already an unfriendly GDPR nightmare, I'm positive to the initiative. And because of the power of the default, I can understand that the feature wouldn't likely take off if it was opt-in, so I won't criticize Mozilla for that move either.

Edit: Weird, some people seem to have received more options than me. For me there was just one option to accept (Zustimmen) and nothing else. Everything was in German but I read German anyway. I was on mobile though, perhaps this is why? I can't see it again because I already pressed it.

A practice (pay or accept cookies) which was actually ruled in breach with GDPR but many German sites seem to do this somehow.

I agree with the criticism on Firefox but this is very hypocritical. Heise used to be a good company. I even used to subscribe to C'T and iX.

Most (all?) companies which developed a browser have lax policies on data privacy. At most those are inline with major directives like GDPR. However, it's not in their best interest to protect / not leverage user data. So the real discussion should've been about the set of features that would attract a sufficiently large user base who would pay ~10$ per month subscription in order to make the model sustainable on the long-term.

There is no negotiating with the advertising industry. No system will stop them from acting unethically to gain an edge.

--

My idea for such a system: random GUID added to each ad. Browser plugin collects GUIDs. Client protects itself with random GUIDs removed and new random GUIDs added. Client sends GUIDs to a Collector they choose. Collectors run client GUIDs against Advertisers lists (bloom filters). Advertisers pay Collectors, and Collectors give to orgs.

Edit: replace GUIDs with 6 random bytes, so the existence of an id is not proof of it's being viewed. it needs to be plausible that the client added an id randomly, and that's not the case with a GUID.