Is it tracking you or tracking ads? If it was the latter and it is made public, that is information I’m sure we would all be interested in
Seems to be the latter.
deleted by creator
It’s always had it.
I’m currently on 115.12.0esr and the feature is absent.
It’s always been in their privacy policy. There just wasn’t a checkbox.
… I don’t know of this is satire or not.
- There is now a feature labeled “Privacy-preserving ad measurement” near the bottom of your Firefox Privacy settings. I recommend turning it off, or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
The fact that both me and you are questioning whether this is satire or not worries me greatly.
Definitely satire, the context from earlier:
- Firefox is worse than Chrome in their implementation of ad snitching, because Chrome enables it only after user consent.
How is that obviously satire?
[edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in
Firefox is worse than Chrome
is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.
or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.
I mean, have you met people? They could be completely serious when posting that lol.
I mean, have you met people?
I mean… I try not to
Same same. Also for like the same reason.
Absolute clown shoes
The updates don’t sound like satire. Some of this is crazypantsrants
In which version is this?
Claim was this happened in ff 128, released july 9. I am currently on 128, and I found it turned on for me.
deleted by creator
Yes. Just checked, was turned on.
I am on flatpak 128 as well and it isn’t there
Is google corrupting Mozilla?
No. This is a privacy-protecting option that gathers no additional information about you or your hardware.
The other link posted in reply is overblown fear-mongering from Mozilla’s single biggest hater because they bought an ad company.
Then why aren’t they putting it up front and shouting from the rooftops about the new “privacy protecting feature”?
a privacy-protecting option that gathers no additional information about you or your hardware.
What information are they gathering then?
A single number per ad campaign of how many times an ad view resulted in a visit or purchase.
Mozilla’s announcement about it explains it pretty well: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
now
why are you doing this to me?!
well at least there are good forks for the browser out there. how long until they start going chrome route?
Feels like google realized that once normies realize how shiti they are, they will run for firefox which by then hopefully will be a properly gutted front end for an ad company.
I see this as them giving companies a more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking. And just another privacy setting to opt out for us.
Instead of a reactive social media post, here’s how it works.
The only real alternative to this conflict of interest between companies and customers is an independent browser.
A more privacy-preserving alternative to tracking does not sound privacy-preserving to me.
it’s like a drizzle is a dryer alternative to a thunderstorm
surely I’d prefer none, but if I had to choose…
Go to the librewolf shop and walk out in a rain coat.
Moot point. Librewolf won’t exist without Firefox.
What are you talking about? No one called the existence of Firefox into question.
- Main dev of open source Ladybird browser not liking homosexuals or whatever:
Community: Boo!
- Mozilla acquiring an ad tech company and implementing it now:
Community: well, they have to (and whatever).
I sense some mental dissonance.
I would call it a vocal minority
Lol ladybird browser Dev is a homophobe? Could you send some evidence, I want to see this joke. Also, yeah, that’s really funny that people are ready to attack anybody with wrong political opinion, but when anybody is attacking them with ads/tracking/MITM they’ll find a thousand excuses for that fucked up behavior. Evils should be treated equally – mitigated and hated. There is no excuse for a single ad/tracker a person haven’t asked for. Same as there is no excuse to hate gays
Could you send some evidence
No i can’t. All i know is that there was some uproar about this a week ago.
The community is VERY MUCH against the decline of Mozilla
if by “community” you mean the majority of users… I think you are backwards in both of those. Most don’t care about what Andreas did, and most firefox users are outraged at this.
Cognitive dissonance? Not supporting bigotry is wholly unrelated to this issue. Also who calls gay people homosexuals? Just say gays like a normal person ffs
I haven’t looked into the technicals much further than the support page.
The way i read it, it sounds like the companies will get some general data if their ads work without a profile about you being created. I would be fine with that. What I don’t like is the lack of communication to users about it being enabled.
PPA does not involve websites tracking you. Instead, your browser is in control. This means strong privacy safeguards, including the option to not participate.
Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:
- Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
- If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
- Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
- Your results are combined with many similar reports by the aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides differential privacy.
This approach has a lot of advantages over legacy attribution methods, which involve many companies learning a lot about what you do online.
PPA does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone. This includes Mozilla and our DAP partner (ISRG). Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising.
This all gets very technical, but we have additional reading for anyone interested in the details about how this works, like our announcement from February 2022 and this technical explainer.
including the option to not participate.
Which is useless if you’re not informed about it.
It appears in the release notes, though. Previously you would have been tracked. Now they try to anonymously return data to the tracker. So I do not see a reason to uncheck that flag.
Admittedly I am interpreting this feature from my gut. And you provide the sources I would have asked for. Appreciated.
The vast majority of people do not read release notes or even know they exist.
There is nothing positive about what has been done here.
Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they’re taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people’s privacy. I can live with that. They’re trying to build a win-win scenario.
I’ll still block ads. I’ll still reject cookies, but I feel like it’s a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I’m still in control of my browser! Great!
Agreed, just frustrating to find out about this here and not an obvious pop up alert somewhere
It looks it it would be fun to mock the report generation API, and returns tons of garbage data (possibly negative numbers).
At that point why not just mock google’s various data mining services’ APIs?
My question is why Mozilla is trying to help advertisers at all instead of telling them to fuck off.
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already. But Mozilla is very much all about trying to make things better for everyone on the internet, regardless about their opinions (or lack thereof) on privacy and ads.
Mozilla has recognised that advertising isn’t going anywhere, so there’s two options:
- Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
- Push for a better alternative that can improve privacy while still keeping the engine that drives the internet intact.
What other major player would ever push for privacy preserving attribution? Hint: no one. While I get that many people here want 0 ads (myself included), PPA is a great step in the right direction, and could have a huge positive impact if it’s shown to work and other companies start adopting it.
And guess what? You can still turn it off, or use adblockers. Unlike Chrome, Firefox won’t restrict you in that regard.
Telling advertisers to fuck off works if your goal is to create a niche product tailored to people who care deeply about privacy already.
Reject ads wholesale and become irrelevant.
Absolute nonsense. How does rejecting ads or even including a default adblocker make Firefox any less relevant? I would hope most people would be more than happy to use a platform free from ads.
Because Firefox is funded by ads, whether it’s the PPA ads outlined in this post, or search referrals from Google. Default adblocking would kill the revenue stream. Maybe Firefox could continue on with volunteers and donations, but not anywhere near its current staffing level. Eventually the engine would fall further and further behind and fewer and fewer people would use it.
To clarify… Making a browser is relatively easy and there’s lots of successful projects that do so without significant revenue. But making a rendering engine is really fucking hard and requires a ton of money to maintain.
Have you used the Internet before? Or used it without a clue how services are usually paid for? You sound a bit clueless. The day they do that, a lot of websites stop working and nagging the user to turn off adblock, which I see all the time (as an advanced user who expects it). If I was a normie who didn’t understand this it might be quite confusing. This is obviously the reason basically no mainstream browser has done this or would do it.
Oh come on now everyone knows what an adblocker is. It’s right in the goddamn name: ad blocker, the thing that blocks ads.
Even if they don’t know how to disable it they can just google it. And if they lack the skill to do that too, they couldn’t have succeeded installing Firefox in the first place.
Stop trying to justify clearly unethical decisions because you used to like the entity who made the decision
Understanding something doesn’t mean you support it. Sad so many people can’t understand this or how normal people operate.
If you make your money through ads you’re a predator with nothing to contribute and don’t deserve to be in service. Eat shit.
Always love people who think you support bad things if you point them out.
I give zero fucks about “the way things are” or how they “have to work”, that’s propaganda to support inaction. I’ve lived my whole life blocking ads and giving the finger to advertisers, and telling me that ads make the world go round and that’s just the way it is regardless of personal opinion on the matter doesn’t jive well with me. Ads provide nothing useful to society, and fall in the same category as predatory CEOs and anticonsumer practices that generate a lot of revenue, but make the world over all a worse place to live. It’s not something to tolerate and put up with as a “necessary evil”, it’s something to target and eliminate.
If a revenue stream breaks just with one browser, deny access of this browser.
This obv. would render firefox impractical over time and therefore irrelevant.
Yes, there are free websites and apps. But you may have to ask yourself why or how these sites keep going.
So while yes - ads can be shown - the user decides if he wants to engage further with the site at hand.
There are ad blockers as plugins for firefox.
My point is: We shouldnt point at mozilla and blame them. They try to align interests I suppose. And I trust them with the anonymous data - I could even check it within its sources if I wanted.
More nonsense. If you’ve ever used a text browser, or a browser without javascript enabled, the vast majority of websites still work fine (Basically just mainstream social media garbage / fascist platforms that aren’t worth your time anyways breaks). If advertisers want to break their sites on non-compliant browsers, it’s as simple as changing your useragent and they have no way of knowing, assuming javascript is disabled. This is pointless hypothetical FUD with little existing precedence (Only thing I can think of is Apple blocking linux useragents that one time) so you can find a way to not hold Mozilla accountable for being a shit platform that’s supporting ad culture again.
it’s as simple as changing your useragent and
Good luck getting the average user to bother with that. But oh wait, the average user would not turn off javascript either, because dealing with that all day is very bothersome. How do I know? Been driving umatrix in whitelisting mode for years. I’ve got used to it, but every time someone sees that I need to reload sites multiple times to unbreak them they are visibly and audibly disgusted. What’s even worse is that they connect this with the fact that I use firefox, even after I tell them this is a fucking addon, and they think Firefox is like that by default.
More nonsense.
Is everything you put up to address my comment.
I did use a text browser. But you apparently fail their purpose. I pipe
<html/>into it so that I can’t be fooled by such propaganda-spitting guys… (…).… fascist platforms that aren’t …
You implied bad about me, so I reason this post with that.
… changing your useragent …
Sounds harder than triggering a flag for a feature which aims at serving you, the user.
Your next sentence, minus the next propaganda, makes me wonder:
This is pointless hypothetical FUD with little existing precedence (…) so you can find a way to not hold Mozilla accountable for being a shit platform that’s supporting ad culture again.
By “This” you mean the topic? I already prompted you my point of view; You didn’t address it. You falsely accuse Mozilla of pushing advertisements down ones throat. Obv. wrong. This undermines my point which I made in order to aid your shortcomings I saw.
You implied bad about me, so I reason this post with that.
Not at all. I was referring to Xshitter and Facebook. I wasn’t trying to imply you were a fascist. Sorry if it seemed that way.
Sounds harder than triggering a flag for a feature which aims at serving you, the user.
Clarify?
You falsely accuse Mozilla of pushing advertisements down ones throat.
My argument in this thread was that Mozilla is supporting ad culture, though I suppose serving targeted ads regardless of anonymity can still be considered “pushing advertisements down ones throat”. Regardless, pocket already exists to push ads down my throat, should I wish it to ;)
deleted by creator
This was not about “making things better for people on the Internet,” it was about a few individuals enriching themselves.
Mozilla Corp is fully owned by a non profit, so there’s no owners getting rich off of any excess profits.
Saying ads are here to stay so you have to accept them or die, is an absurd false dichotomy
I’d love for nothing more than for there to be a viable alternative!
deleted by creator
They didn’t sell your data before
Firefox has been funded by ads from the beginning, and has had sponsored tiles (aka ads) since around 2014 I think?
I personally think there’s a difference between selling ads and selling your data too. I’m going to go on a limb and say you see no distinction.
deleted by creator
Given that it collects no additional user data, and the API in question is a new standard that will require sites to opt in, I think making it an opt-out is sensible. I guess they could make a popup about it, but I really think this concern is baseless FUD from people who haven’t read the details.
I think making it an opt-out is sensible
The GDPR does not think so, does it?
No, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t trip GDPR because it’s not collecting any additional personal data.
I think making it an opt-out is sensible
Why? I’m not in the business of making ad companies’ jobs easier.
Let’s be real, there’s no way PPA is going to be as valuable as the data that can be gathered by state of the art ad tech. So the ad companies that adopt this will be making a compromise to do so. How is this tech making their lives easier?
Also they have no incentive to develop this tech, so why would they? It’s not like Mozilla is doing work for them that they would have done anyway. If anything they’re probably worried that the tech will take off and then legislation will follow to force them to use it.
I personally am fine with making it opt-out, but I think it should be handled differently. This technology requires users trust, to have any chance of being successful. Enabling it without informing the user is not the way to gain it.
I would have put a little pop up explaining that they are trying to create a privacy preserving technology to measure ads with the goal of replacing privacy invasive technology. If the user doesn’t like it, it can be disabled in the settings afterwards.
I wouldnt say it’s baseless, but there does seem to be a certain motivation with some people, every time Firefox makes a misstep.
I agree with this. I understand that the majority of users also don’t read release notes and some don’t even install add-ons, with this being enabled by default this would provide them with a more anonymous ad experience.
WTF… i thought this was just click bait but went to check on my phone as i am not at my PC right now
These are old options. I checked these off long ago.
I’m using mull fork of Firefox which doesn’t even have these settings, the tracking features are completely removed from the browser.
This browser still makes lots of unsolicited connections to Firefox on each launch. Regardless of the settings you’ll choose. There are no single good browser on Android.
I mostly see telemetry requests getting blocked in my firewall. Is there anything else I’ve missed?
Does your browser make connections on launch when you haven’t even opened anything? That should not happen.
Use Mull
Just checked mine and it’s all disabled
I’m using Mull.
I know, that’s awful. I also turn it off. But that’s actually different than the new feature mentioned in this post. This has existed for years already (I think)
I’m on 128 on my phone. I just checked and both of those are disabled for me.
Same
double same
Triple same.
I’m on 128 on my phone and it was on for me, I definitely didn’t turn those on myself. wtf.
Idk what 128 is on a phone, but my galaxy s21 had everything still off. Guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it
build number (version) of Firefox, which is the software in question.
“Galaxy S21” is the model name for a physical Samsung phone, which isn’t relevant to the topic.
Oh, heard that. I’m on 128 on my phone too and they were all disabled
Mine was off, just checked.
It was on for me too, wtf…
Here’s the info about it: https://mzl.la/3AcmG8q
They haven’t added ad tracking. That’s a fake news. You should read up on how it actually works.
I’ve read up on how it works and it says it’s tracking how well or badly ads perform when shown to me. That’s tracking ads, otherwise called ad tracking.
What now?
It’s not tracking you. It’s not the same.
It’s tracking how well ads perform without tracking individual users. Tracking ads isn’t the problem. Tracking users is the problem. Before this the only way to track ad performance was by tracking users. This is a way to track ad performance without tracking users.
I still don’t want advertisers to know if their ads were effective on me
Tracking ads is also a problem, just a different one. The whole point of ads is to manipulate your behavior. There’s plenty of reason to not want to make that more effective
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/p1m2bc/who_are_adjust_the_mobile_marketing_vendor_used/
Whatever it is, it’s been around for at least 3 years.
This almost sounds like a hoax. But assuming it’s true… Install LibreWolf. It’s Firefox without the infuriating Mozilla stupid.
So… finally Mozilla has slowly but surely going into the dark side huh…
I’m not surprised anymore, they even had telemetry code inside android apps from waaay back then (although seems for debugging purpose)In the end I’m not justify all company bc they need money for survive & exist, although i don’t like the way they do it
Mull or Fennic although Fennic needs a lot of settings changed for privacy
Mozilla has been bad actors since at least 2017, they implemented a piece of malware called Cliqz on a small number of German user’s installs that recommends various services based on browser history (aka tracking and advertising); so I’d hardly call this a new development, or Mozilla “just now” falling to the dark side (and that’s not even mentioning pocket and DoH to cloudflare, which are still enabled by default).
This isn’t ad tracking though. Do you even know how this works?
What’s the behavior before this option was added? Would websites track you or not?
They definitely didn’t just stop tracking you because this option exists.
weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it
For everyone trying to find the setting— On my android phone, there’s a setting called “data collection”. Mine were already all off, so idk who it affects
