[HN Gopher] Privacy preserving attribution for advertising
___________________________________________________________________
Privacy preserving attribution for advertising
Author : Santosh83
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-02-11 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Thinking high level, does anyone have a sense of how many folks
| get paid to work on Firefox?
|
| Which projects currently under the Mozilla/Firefox umbrella are
| worth splitting off and funding?
| errantmind wrote:
| > Advertising provides critical support for the Web
|
| The premise is flawed, IMO. I remember a time when the web was
| just fine without incessant advertising. If it disappeared it
| would still be fine. Some sites would die out, others would rise.
|
| I've said it before, but I personally would be fine with every
| site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away. I
| also think this would improve the signal:noise ratio of the web
| considerably.
| nicce wrote:
| > I remember a time when the web was just fine without
| incessant advertising.
|
| That is from the time when not everyone was in the web. Now as
| basically everyone is here, it is the best place to affect on
| the minds of people.
| nojs wrote:
| > I personally would be fine with every site that relies on
| advertising for its existence to go away
|
| That would arguably include HN, which publishes some sponsored
| threads for YC companies
| errantmind wrote:
| I suppose I should have specified "paid advertising". I
| personally don't see self-promotion as an issue.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| There will be tons of people who will rightly rake Mozilla over
| the coals for this so I don't need to do it.
|
| That being said I honestly feel for Mozilla in some way. Making a
| browser as your primary product is just not profitable without
| monetizing your userbase in some form or fashion and it takes a
| shit ton of work to keep it modern and secure. They will get
| dragged through the mud no matter what they try. People still rag
| on them for accepting money from Google to be the default search
| engine.
| notyourday wrote:
| Rubbish. Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million
| users who would pay $100/year for it. Of course it would mean
| that it will have to become a _product_ company rather than
| another bored housewives club masquerading as a software
| company with some software engineers working for it.
| shishy wrote:
| > Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who
| would pay $100/year for it
|
| Call me a pessimist but I doubt this. Most people don't mind
| ads, and when you couple that with the vast number of free
| browser alternatives, I doubt so many people would pay (and
| even if they got some, I'd expect churn to be high too).
| notyourday wrote:
| Quite literally every single company with aspirations would
| immediately subscribe to it because absolutely no one wants
| their company information being leaked out to Google or
| Facebook or anyone else if they do not absolutely have to.
| Right now there is no such option.
| kmlx wrote:
| > Mozilla would have zero issues getting 10 million users who
| would pay $100/year for it.
|
| why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them
| are free?
| lolinder wrote:
| If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and _only_
| Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I 'd do it in a
| heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.
| younghag wrote:
| The fact that it's not even an option really makes me
| scratch my head. There's a decent amount of people who
| would like to throw some money their way to support
| Firefox specifically. Maybe not a ton, but certainly
| enough to warrant the option for people to do so.
| notyourday wrote:
| > why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of
| them are free?
|
| The browser that does not track you, does not report to
| Google or facebook, etc? That's why.
| lawn wrote:
| Because it would be so much better than the alternatives?
| [deleted]
| arcatech wrote:
| If they added an optional "support Firefox by paying $100
| per year" button, some people would do it because they want
| to support the browser.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I definitely would if it meant I wouldn't have to see a
| single ad ever again. I'm at the point in my life where
| trading money for not seeing ads is very appealing to me.
| Between Hulu, Youtube Premium, Spotify, etc. I pay an
| absurd amount of money every year to not see ads. I'd
| definitely do the same if a browser could hide any and all
| ads from me, and the sum I'd pay is a lot more than $100
| year.
| sgift wrote:
| What exactly does "a product company" mean in your mind?
| notyourday wrote:
| It has a product that people pay for. It finds the market
| for its product and features for its product not based on
| "we are Chrome alternative don't pay attention to us
| sending all the stuff to Google and others who would give
| us money" but on what its paying customers want to see.
| wayne-li2 wrote:
| This is our bias seeping in. On HN, I'm willing to bet a
| substantial proportion of people are willing to pay for an
| anti-ad/tracking browser for privacy reasons. But there will
| be no value for the outside world.
|
| I think us "nerds" dramatically overvalue how important
| privacy is to the general public right now. Even ignoring the
| developing world, most people will agree that tracking is
| bad, but most will continue to use legacy browsers because
| they don't think it's 100/year bad. And the growing
| population of young and tech savvy people who are one Google
| away from installing uBlock Origin will not pay for your
| product either.
|
| Not to mention --- even the proportion of HN readers can take
| other measures to approximate anti tracking anyways. uBlock
| Origin + Pihole + a good VPN is enough for even most of us
| (personally, it is enough for me).
| amatecha wrote:
| I mean, there are tons of massively successful free (beer and
| liberty) software that have been around for decades. Why does
| Mozilla need Meta's or Google's money? Why have other free
| software products (thinking of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD
| here) had active, high-quality development for decades without
| resorting to harvesting user data for profit? Isn't Mozilla a
| non-profit corporation? Hell, their website's title is
| "Internet for people, not profit", so what's happening here?
| And like someone else raised, why isn't there Mozilla and
| Firefox official swag?!
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Mozilla can follow FreeBSD and OpenBSD's example and achieve
| a marketshare just as negligible as theirs. And just like
| FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Mozilla can wave goodbye to official
| support by any major consumer service or software.
|
| Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN.
| You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of
| gear is a little weird though because they used to have a
| gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear
| was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official
| gear.
| Kenji wrote:
| errantmind wrote:
| It would be plenty profitable without their organizational
| bloat, especially if they refocused on what their actual users
| want instead of other initiatives.
|
| How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in
| donations every year without selling out their users. Even a
| small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay
| competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox
| development team is a small fraction of their org.
| Pooge wrote:
| > Making a browser as your primary product is just not
| profitable without monetizing your userbase in some form or
| fashion and it takes a shit ton of work to keep it modern and
| secure.
|
| Then why can I not purchase Mozilla merch? They shutdown or
| abandoned some of their most interesting services (MDN and
| Send, for example), but kept developing unneeded products : (1)
| VPN, which is just a layer over Mullvad that makes it worse and
| (2) Lockwise which is much better replaced with almost _any_
| alternative password manager (like KeePassXC and the browser
| add-on if you really need it).
|
| Of course, they weren't wrong for at least trying, but then why
| not make it part of a pool of products that only premium users
| can access? For example, make it so that only Premium users can
| upload to Send. But no, all we get is just a sh*t VPN.
|
| Mozilla doesn't want your money, and they're going to die for
| it.
| lolinder wrote:
| The VPN is garbage, but they did end up killing Lockwise.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-
| firefox-...
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| How is the VPN bad? If I recall, it's just Mullvad with
| Firefox branding.
| wford7 wrote:
| When I tried it, it flat out didn't work. Zero issues with
| Mullvad itself.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| I used it for a few months and I did have a few
| intermittent issues but it worked for the most part
| kup0 wrote:
| I wish the company/organization behind my favorite and only
| browser didn't continue to be so tone-deaf. Their reputation in
| my mind had already been soured, in spite of them having the best
| browser for my use.
|
| Now they make a ludicrous decision to involve Meta in what they
| think are _privacy discussions_? I cannot be swayed into seeing
| Meta 's involvement as anything other than a detriment
| DavideNL wrote:
| This feels like a very bad development.
|
| Out of curiosity.... what would the best alternative to Firefox
| be, in regards to privacy? (macOS/Ubuntu/Windows)
| assemblylang wrote:
| Librewolf[0] is probably the best alternative, drop-in
| replacement for firefox in terms of privacy. It's essentially
| (base firefox + privacy patches + privacy policies and
| configs), and available on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and more.
|
| edit: Expect though that some parts of the web won't work with
| it since WebGL and DRM are disabled.
|
| [0] https://librewolf.net/
| chobytes wrote:
| have been using librewolf. seems like a good balance of "not
| mozilla" and usable.
| nolok wrote:
| So I understand they're doing this because it's their revenue
| source and they feel they have to play ball, but this pretty much
| means they're done.
|
| After having lost many battles and flags the one thing they have
| is that they're not helping them spy on you, it's barely enough
| to keep them relevant, and they want to dump that too.
|
| That's what happens when the people in charge of taking the
| decisions are not representative of the core users of the
| product, and thus don't understand what makes the product good or
| bad for their users. You will not find 1% of current Firefox
| users by choice who would say they think this is a good decision.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| There is still money to squeeze for C-Suites.
| lrvick wrote:
| We do not need to work with Facebook and companies like them. We
| do not need to compromise with them. We need to starve them.
| Complex cryptography to try to make less bad ads feels like a
| nicotine patch when what we need is pictures of lung cancer on
| the cigarette boxes and laws that forbid addicting children. We
| need education so people enable ad blocking until online
| advertising ceases to be as viable of a business model.
|
| Surveillance capitalism corps must be forced to adapt and start
| charging people for the value they provide in a clear and honest
| way instead of trying to sell human psyche hacking as a service
| like a globally adopted casino of profit optimized manipulation.
| One we all let our kids participate in.
|
| People pay money for coffee. They can pay a tiny bit for
| bandwidth for use of Social Media like any other SaaS. Maybe if
| it costs a tiny bit people will ration their use of it a bit more
| and use their extra time to go learn something useful.
| fartcannon wrote:
| There are many forks of Firefox these days. Librewolf on
| desktops, Mull on mobile. I haven't vetted them yet, but today
| I'm going to start.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| I want to focus a comment on Mozilla Firefox generally. I see a
| lot of hate being expressed here but I do get a sense of
| entitlement from some comments. Firefox is a free-of-cost product
| and surely we all know by now that if you don't pay for it you're
| the product, not the customer.
|
| I don't allow tracking or advertising at all, whether from
| Internet services or local radio and TV (mostly do not use ad-
| supported stations), never had a Facebook/Twitter/etc., account,
| not used Google for the last decade, and so on.
|
| However, in exchange for avoiding tracking and adverts, I
| actively pay for services I appreciate in whatever way they
| provide for whether through purchase, subscription, or donation.
|
| I really wish Mozilla Corporation would have a DONATE TO FIREFOX
| option* to directly support development of the browser (and
| Thunderbird) and a max-privacy version. This would directly
| quantify real support from those like me that object to tracking
| and/or invasive adverts - I suspect the amount raised would be
| minimal, but it'd put the default search engine funding into
| perspective.
|
| Not a lot of people realise that donating to the Mozilla
| Foundation does NOT support Firefox development by Mozilla
| Corporation.
|
| * I was one of those that paid for Netscape Navigator back in the
| mid 1990s before Microsoft released Internet Explorer as part of
| the Windows OS and wiped out the paid-for browser market and
| forced Netscape Navigator to be released free of charge in order
| to try to compete - which directly led to Mozilla and Firefox.
| richardfey wrote:
| Is this the Mozilla equivalent of Google 's Topics[1] (previously
| FLoC)?
|
| [1] https://github.com/jkarlin/topics
| ekr____ wrote:
| No. Topics is oriented at targeting ads to people with specific
| interests.
|
| This technology is designed to measure "conversion", e.g., when
| people click on an ad and then buy the corresponding product in
| a privacy-preserving way.
| richardfey wrote:
| Alright, thanks!
| cyral wrote:
| FLoC is for targeting, this is for attribution.
| hericium wrote:
| Could've been handled better. Mozilla is Google's bitch.
| [deleted]
| olliej wrote:
| How does this compare to WebKits privacy preserving attribution?
| ekr____ wrote:
| They have similar objectives but achieve them differently.
| Roughly, Private Click Measurement uses very low entropy
| identifiers to achieve rough of clicks and conversions. IPA
| uses multiparty computation instead. Probably the most salient
| differences are:
|
| PCM leaks _some_ information about user behavior, but it has a
| high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the
| reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X%
| chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal
| aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational
| complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in
| the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don 't collude).
|
| PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion
| (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a
| laptop). IPA potentially does.
|
| Ben Savage's slides cover this in more detail:
| https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telec...
| olliej wrote:
| The slides imply cross device/browser identification? I can't
| see how that happens without some kind of shared account
| mechanism.
|
| The slides imply that losing cross device attribution is a
| regression. It absolutely is not, as such ability does not
| currently exist. So this
|
| While I recognize the advertisers may want attribution, but
| it still seems like FB+Google both still want to know as much
| about the user as possible, and both definitely have the
| resources to achieve the de-anonymising attacks (especially
| given chrome's ever present attempts to get people to tie
| their entire browsing session to their google identity).
| ekr____ wrote:
| You're right that this assumes an account. The way that
| cross device/browser identification works in IPA is that if
| you are logged into example.com (though realistically,
| often Facebook) then it can set a "match key" which is the
| same on device and browser. You can't read the match key,
| only write it. This match key is used to link up activities
| on both. The point of the crypto is to rerandomize the
| match key that appears in the reports so that it is
| possible two see that two actions are from the same device
| but not link that back up to the original match key. Note
| that in this proposal, the assumption is that anyone would
| be able to use anyone else's match key (addressed by
| origin) so that it's not a big advantage to be the site
| with the account.
|
| Re whether this is a regression or not: I am not an expert
| on how the current attribution mechanism works but I
| believe that if people are logged into (for instance)
| Facebook then Facebook can use that to correlate clicks on
| device A with purchases on device B.
| nottorp wrote:
| Safari is less resource hungry on Macs :)
|
| Or was before the last "redesign".
|
| I guess ungoogled chromium might be a solution.
|
| Or: what's a decent ad blocking solution for modern Safari?
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Call me cynical but I'm guessing that Meta just made a large
| donation to Mozilla and in turn they're using Mozilla to
| whitewash this proposal. They're just buying Mozilla's reputation
| (what's left of it) for their purposes.
|
| FTA: > _We've been looking to apply privacy preserving
| advertising technology to the attribution problem, so that
| advertisers can get answers to important questions without
| harming privacy._
|
| Mozilla's is basically looking for a unicorn.
|
| If they really cared about user privacy, they would have shipped
| an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser by
| default. However, if you look at where their revenue is coming
| from, you quickly realize why that will never happen.
| sfink wrote:
| I think such a donation would end up in the annual report, at
| least in some form. If it were big enough to matter, anyway.
|
| But I personally don't need to speculate, since I find the
| notion very unlikely. Meta needs Mozilla here since anything
| they propose will be viewed with intense suspicion. If they
| _are_ legitimately interested in a moderately privacy-
| preserving solution, which they very well might be (and not out
| of the goodness of their hearts), then they 'll need buy-in
| from other players. Mozilla is probably a fiercer opponent than
| it is a useful ally, but just in terms of gathering support
| it's a decent place to start.
|
| Mozilla needs Meta in order to make any headway on the privacy
| disaster that is the modern web. It doesn't have the market
| share to dominate the fight, so it makes sense to forge a
| temporary alliance when other pressures push Meta in the right
| direction. (This is assuming Mozilla's intentions are noble. I
| work for Mozilla, and am biased to think so, so I won't second-
| guess. But cleaning up this shit-show is kinda part of our
| mission, so it really shouldn't be hard to swallow.)
|
| It seems like Google is the elephant in the room. Could Meta +
| Mozilla move the needle against Google's objections? I doubt
| it. Meta + Mozilla + public opinion? Maybe.
|
| > If they really cared about user privacy, they would have
| shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech in their browser
| by default. However, if you look at where their revenue is
| coming from, you quickly realize why that will never happen.
|
| First, Firefox _does_ ship a lot of anti-tracking tech, as much
| of it by default as possible without breaking sites too much.
|
| Second, they'd ship an ad blocker by default if they really
| cared about making a useless statement. I doubt Google would
| pay much for search traffic that generates zero revenue. Even
| if Mozilla were to magically diversify its income to survive
| the loss of Google, though, I'm not sure such a move would be
| in the long-term best interests of the web. Tracking is the
| true enemy of privacy, not ads.
|
| Ads suck and are doing massive damage to our civilization, in
| ways far beyond what I've heard discussed. But a zero-ad future
| isn't automatically going to be peaches and cream either. It
| could easily end up being a web (and media) of the rich, by the
| rich, and for the rich.
| akersten wrote:
| > they would have shipped an ad blocking and anti-tracking tech
| in their browser by default.
|
| In theory they do - the Tracking Protection thingy is on by
| default last I checked. I guess dirty money's hard to resist.
| jefftk wrote:
| It is not on by default: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Privacy/Trackin...
| ekr____ wrote:
| The naming around the various features is confusing.
| Briefly:
|
| - Tracking Protection basically blocks connections to known
| trackers entirely so the resources don't even load.
|
| - Enhanced Tracking Protection prevents various kinds of
| cross-site tracking by blocking cookies, etc.
| (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-
| prote...).
|
| ETP is on by default. TP is not.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| I found this paper interesting [1] and how they
| characterize Firefox' behavior out of the box:
| We investigate the request behavior of each browser
| (Figure 7). Brave is the most effective at reducing
| third- party tracking-and-advertising requests; its
| claim to (1) is supported. The other privacy-
| focused browsers vary significantly in terms of
| reducing third-party tracking- and-advertising
| requests. Firefox Focus and Ghostery differ
| significantly in how much they reduce third- party
| tracking-and-advertising requests, but the perfor-
| mance of both supports their claims, (1) and (2). Fire-
| fox is least effective at reducing third-party tracking-
| and-advertising requests. This is unsurprising, as Fire-
| fox's enabled-by-default "standard" tracking protection
| "blocks fewer trackers" [79]. It errs on the side of
| caution in what it blocks, focusing on restricting
| tracking cook- ies, social-media trackers, and
| fingerprinting scripts; it does not block other
| content (loaded ads, videos) that may perform
| tracking [78, 105]. Thus, while Firefox claims (2),
| its blocking of tracking and advertising is limited
| with its default settings.
|
| This is quite disappointing given Mozilla's marketing
| around privacy.
|
| [1] https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue1/pop
| ets-202...
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Is this a joke?
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Thats it , i am done , i had installed mozilla because of
| sympathy , now its time to uninstall.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| i've been bouncing between firefox and vivaldi lately, I
| think i've made up my mind
| blondin wrote:
| vivaldi had me with their vertical tabs.
|
| they were the first to do it natively and properly. but my
| excitement didn't last. i was having a hard time with their
| bazillion settings. i wanted something that works well out
| of the box. i know some people like all these possible
| options but it was not for me.
|
| nowadays, i use edge for vertical tabs.
|
| edge is chrome with vertical tabs in my world. but it would
| be cool if the minimized sidebar didn't expand on hover.
| it's a user experience nightmare. (in case any engineer on
| the edge project is reading)
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Fuuuuuck.
|
| Jesus Fucking Christ, Mozilla.
|
| You are just really set on annihilating what's left of your
| userbase, aren't you? Was it a rider in the contact for using
| Google as a default search engine? It's just gotta be, because
| it's hard to think of any other reason for something _this_ anti-
| user being peddled with such a straight face. Working with THE
| worst perpetrator that is known for its complete and utter
| disregard for people 's privacy on some PRIVACY PRESERVING
| bullshit feature.
|
| WHAT THE PROVERBIAL FUCK. I am speechless.
|
| (A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days).
| ModernMech wrote:
| > A die-hard Firefox user since the Navigator days
|
| I know, talk about dying a young as a hero or living long
| enough to become a villain.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The Mozilla we knew and loved for decades died some time around
| 2015-ish. Sales and marketing completely took over the
| organization. They've been slashing engineering projects, and
| pushing these "key partnerships" nonstop since then. It's very
| obvious the executive team there couldn't care less about the
| original mission anymore. Their last remaining meaningful
| product (Firefox) is essentially in maintenance mode at this
| point. It's sad to say, but they are now just another tech
| company interested in nothing but mining your personal data for
| profit.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without fulminating.
|
| Perhaps you don't owe privacy preserving advertising
| attributing browsers better, but you owe this community better
| if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I though you'd might have a problem with my comment.
|
| This is however an exceptional situation, a piece of news so
| shocking and unwelcome that the only way I can properly
| express the level of frustration with it is through the use
| of expletives and the uppercase. It is absolutely
| disheartening to see a long-lived and excellent piece of
| software being so ruthlessly, cynically and systematically
| destroyed. It really makes my blood boil.
| zamalek wrote:
| This might be a bit controversial, given the large amount of "F
| Mozilla" comments already present. The problem is the advertising
| industry, not advertising. Run a thought experiment quickly,
| let's say you wanted to start a pro-privacy/anti-
| malvertising/anti-flashing-bullshit advertising service (the
| tasteful ads that the likes of daringfireball sometimes
| features):
|
| There's a thousand obvious things you can do: text-only, having
| the author select "adwords," etc. The problem you'll face no
| matter what is click-harvesting, how do you know that a real
| person has clicked the ad?
|
| Facebook was the wrong fucking partner here, but maybe attacking
| or deliberating on the technical aspects of the specification
| would be a better discussion. If this thing isn't supposed to
| track us, then we should probably figure out if it actually
| achieves that, instead of frothing at the mouth. Browsers are
| going to implement it one way or another.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > The problem is the advertising industry, not advertising.
|
| Mmm, I guess we just can't agree on that.
|
| > Run a thought experiment quickly, let's say you wanted to
| start a pro-privacy/anti-malvertising/anti-flashing-bullshit
| advertising service (the tasteful ads that the likes of
| daringfireball sometimes features)
|
| It's very difficult to run that thought experiment because it
| is so antithetical to my views on advertising. It's akin to
| asking me to imagine running a pro-faithful-monogamous-marriage
| whorehouse. Ads create a perverse incentive to fill the web
| with garbage. It's destroying the web. It's ruining search,
| it's making it hard to find the actually valuable information
| online. 99% of crap on the internet is there because ads enable
| people to make a quick buck out of it. Advertising not only
| supports that crap, but directly encourages it.
|
| > The problem you'll face no matter what is click-harvesting,
| how do you know that a real person has clicked the ad?
|
| Like, why am I supposed to give a shit? How do the advertisers
| who put a billboard next street or the ones who advertise in
| the local newspaper know I tapped the printed ad? They don't,
| and they don't need to know. They can try to figure out but
| they're not entitled to that knowledge and I'm not interested
| in helping them out.
|
| And I don't see why Mozilla should be helping advertisers with
| this either. If Mozilla wants to help destroy advertising, undo
| the damage it's caused to the web, and make the web better,
| they should rather include an adblocker and help us find out
| ways to make it impossible for advertisers to tell if there's a
| real person behind the screen. Or if there's a screen at all.
|
| > If this thing isn't supposed to track us, then we should
| probably figure out if it actually achieves that
|
| That is something I can definitely agree on, and I was really
| hoping the top voted comment here would've been an analysis of
| the proposal.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Ad tracking doesn't need to be click based. Modern
| advertisements have existed for two hundred years and tracking
| has existed for twenty.
| Aachen wrote:
| This. I didn't quite understand the multiparty computation
| thing, so I came here for someone to explain it without bias
| (since of course the authors would claim it's the best thing
| since sliced bread or, more recently, https).
|
| Well, I found bias and no explanations. I'm getting to various
| comments without any replies so I think I'm almost at the
| bottom, from here it's only downvoted comments to go...
| danShumway wrote:
| Oh. Bigger story here appears to be that the proposal is publicly
| editable and has already been vandalized. I'm not going to link
| to it, but I will say that I'm not thrilled that Mozilla is
| handling proposals using these formats/hosting choices.
|
| So much of this feels weird to me.
|
| I don't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla partnering
| with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe
| that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a
| privacy standard or that it would ever do anything other than try
| to weaken the standard.
|
| I can't read up on the IPA standard because the link is currently
| being vandalized, so I can't really comment on that, but this is
| dangerous ground to tread and also I vaguely feel like as a user
| I might want to _not_ have ads attributed across devices.
|
| Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse than
| Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively the
| best browser to use for privacy right now. But crud this
| announcement is weird and vaguely tone-deaf and doesn't make me
| feel good, and I think at the very least it should have been
| worded less as a celebration, or at least should have spent more
| time going into why I shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the
| whole thing.
|
| It's potentially a longer conversation, but the article also
| doesn't really make a strong case for why I should be rooting for
| a privacy-respecting system for advertisers in the first place.
| sneak wrote:
| > _I don 't understand how I'm supposed to take Mozilla
| partnering with Facebook, I don't understand why I'm supposed
| to believe that Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to
| add to a privacy standard or that it would ever do anything
| other than try to weaken the standard._
|
| You should take it the exact same way as when:
|
| - Mozilla put proprietary, closed-source DRM (widevine) into
| their product
|
| - Mozilla put nonconsensual (opt-out) telemetry (aka spyware)
| into their product
|
| - Mozilla put Google backend services into their product
|
| - Mozilla put advertising/paid placement into their product
|
| The "Mozilla is about privacy and open standards" meme is a
| false one and has been for a long time. Actions speak a lot
| louder than words.
| drdaeman wrote:
| You're probably gonna be downvoted a lot, but I'm afraid
| you're correct. Mozilla cares about web standards (like HTML
| or CSS or WebExtensions) - that was their mission after all,
| it's wrong to say they don't. But their action repeatedly
| show that don't care about open standards for anything else,
| like their browser itself.
|
| I'll give another example - look at their Sync system. It's a
| pseudo-open unholy mess of Mozilla-unique ("proprietary" as
| in "owned by and unique to a certain company") standards
| without any regard for interoperabilty and openness. I'm 99%
| positive it could've been a couple of standard technologies,
| but they reinvented everything (auth, blob storage,
| everything) in absolutely unnecessarily unique manner, and
| awfully overengineered. I've had pleasure of attempting an
| alternative implementation based on their specs (to self-
| host, had to abandon because it's all way too hostile), so I
| know what I'm talking about. It's under a guise of "open
| standards" (in a sense it happens to be partially documented)
| but no single engineer in their sane mind would adopt this
| for their own projects.
|
| Privacy and security? Last time I've checked (admittedly, a
| couple years ago) it was years since they knew their Firefox
| Account/Sync auth has security issues and has to trust
| Mozilla servers to be secure (login form and cryptography
| suite is not built into browser, like in proper end-to-end
| encrypted software, but served online), and they didn't do a
| thing about it, entirely dismissing it as a non-issue.
| Could've sent that password over HTTPS and just promise to
| not to save it (actually my alternative now-dead
| Accounts/Sync implementation did just that as a shortcut). In
| other words, Mozilla gets a nice gag order (or gets hacked)
| and they can be forced to circumvent all their end-to-end
| encryption pull your browsing history just fine without
| changing a thing on your machine so no local code audit would
| help. That's not how privacy-conscious software is written
| (e.g. Signal - it might get backdoored, but it'll need an
| update to deliver a backdoor).
|
| It doesn't help that there are no alternatives I'm aware of.
| Firefox sucks but that's - sadly - the best we have.
| btdmaster wrote:
| This is correct for the most part, but please consider that
| Mozilla tried to stop DRM being standardised and only has it
| as an opt-in extension:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/drm-and-the-challenge-
| of...
| danShumway wrote:
| Oh, come on.
|
| I _did_ raise a stink over closed-source DRM, I raised a
| stink not just over Firefox adding it, I raised a stink over
| the entire web standards process. I have raised stinks about
| telemetry and advertising within Firefox. I 've raised stinks
| about Pocket being purchased and not Open Sourced, and then
| integrated into the browser by default. I've raised stink
| about a lot of things.
|
| Nevertheless, it is still objectively true that Mozilla
| Firefox is the best mainstream browser right now for privacy,
| and anyone who argues otherwise is either not looking at the
| bigger picture or hasn't done much research into how
| companies do the majority of their tracking online. The
| privacy problems that Mozilla has had have objectively less
| impact on people's everyday privacy than Chromium's hobbled
| extension support. The ability to turn on anti-fingerprinting
| features uplifted from Tor is more important than whether or
| not Google search is enabled by default. Container-extensions
| are more practically impactful on everyday privacy than
| Pocket is.
|
| I am literally complaining about and criticizing Mozilla
| right now, and yet the immediate reaction is to jump on the
| one positive thing I said and act like I'm somehow ignoring
| Mozilla's other issues. I'm not ignoring those issues, but
| the "Mozilla is corrupt and no better than Google" meme is
| similarly completely ridiculous. Every single other browser
| on the market including DeGoogled Chromium and Safari are
| hobbled in ways that make them worse for privacy, and overall
| Mozilla still as a company has a better track record on
| fighting for privacy and building privacy-preserving tools
| than Google/Microsoft/Brave -- at least it has a better track
| record in the ways that matter.
|
| It is so frustrating to try and have a constructive
| conversation about real missteps that Mozilla is making when
| people view anything less than a complete condemnation of the
| company like that means they're being put on a pedestal.
| Mozilla isn't perfect, and it's clumsy and sometimes does
| outright bad stuff, and that is still consistent with them
| being one of the better corporate privacy advocates on the
| Internet.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Every single other browser on the market including
| DeGoogled Chromium and Safari are hobbled in ways that make
| them worse for privacy_
|
| I'm curious about why you believe this about Ungoogled
| Chromium, as I had concluded the opposite after
| researching.
| danShumway wrote:
| This is a great question, and it gets to the heart of
| practical privacy online.
|
| DeGoogled Chromium does actually have less telemetry
| problems than Firefox, so it's really easy for DeGoogled
| Chromium proponents to say that it's the most private.
| The issue is that DeGoogled Chromium is Chromium, and
| Chromium is a less privacy-capable browser engine than
| Firefox.
|
| That could be a longer conversation, but the short
| versions:
|
| - Chromium lacks a number of privacy features that
| Firefox has, including some anti-fingerprinting options
| that can be enabled through `about:config`, and container
| support, which is a really big deal for isolating site
| data and avoiding correlating user sessions on websites
| like Github/Youtube/etc... with incidental visits to
| those sites.
|
| - Chromium's extension API is hobbled, particularly in a
| couple of areas that Ublock Origin cares about. The wiki
| goes into more detail on this[0].
|
| ----
|
| The mistake is in looking at the small amount of
| (admittedly bad) data-leakage that Firefox does have and
| being so worried about that information being sent to
| Google/Cloudflare that you pick a browser that is less
| good at keeping you private on every other site you
| visit, including visits to Google/Cloudflare pages.
|
| Thinking practically about this stuff is just a really
| hard thing to learn to do, at least it is for me. Maybe
| other people are magically good at it. But I regularly
| find that it's helpful for me to sit down and think
| through my privacy goals more tangibly in the form of
| "how much data is X actually leaking, what should my
| priorities be based on the volume/nature?" A lot of
| people worry about privacy problems in the wrong order.
|
| DeGoogled Chromium _does_ have better defaults than
| Firefox in multiple areas. It 's just that the privacy
| benefits from those changes don't outweigh a crippled
| Ublock Origin install.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-
| issues/wiki/uBlock-Or...
| 6equj5 wrote:
| >anti-fingerprinting options that can be enabled through
| `about:config`
|
| For reference: `privacy.resistFingerprinting`
| jacquesm wrote:
| > It is so frustrating to try and have a constructive
| conversation about real missteps that Mozilla is making
| when people view anything less than a complete condemnation
| of the company like it's holding them on a pedestal.
|
| Check the title. It is absolutely on topic. Mozilla is
| doing this to themselves, each and every one of those is an
| unforced error. If your mission really is a free and open
| as well as privacy respecting web you don't invite the
| largest privacy violator on the planet to the table to have
| a say. Just like you don't invite serial killers and
| druglords to your panel on how to combat crime.
| danShumway wrote:
| > If your mission really is a free and open as well as
| privacy respecting web you don't invite the largest
| privacy violator on the planet to the table to have a
| say.
|
| If you're trying to insinuate that working with Google or
| Facebook on this issue means that Mozilla _fundamentally_
| doesn 't care about privacy, that is a ridiculous,
| fantastical claim that requires closing your eyes to
| years of work from the company.
|
| I am right here criticizing Mozilla for partnering with
| Facebook, they should not be doing that. It's
| irresponsible and harmful. Nevertheless, Firefox is
| objectively the most private consumer-grade browser on
| the market, including Brave and DeGoogled Chromium.
| Nevertheless, Mozilla has done more to push web privacy
| forward than the majority of people on this site myself
| included, and more to push web privacy forward than the
| entirety of the rest of the browser market.
|
| Even if you are on topic, there's nothing constructive
| about jumping onto every Mozilla thread arguing that
| Mozilla is the same as Google when they're very clearly
| not. It's unproductive because I shouldn't even need to
| be wasting my time defending a company that I came here
| _to criticize_. It makes it harder to fix real problems
| when all of them are equated and treated as being
| identically severe, and when the conclusion everyone
| draws from every problem is "use something based on
| Chrome and give up on the entire effort".
| BbzzbB wrote:
| >Facebook would ever have beneficial insight to add to a
| privacy standard
|
| I'm not saying "this is it", but here's a (IMO) reasonable line
| of thought why they would genuinely be working in that
| direction. Basically, short term pain for long term security.
| There is a clear preference by consumers for preserving
| privacy; the percentage of iOS users not allowing targeting
| since IDFA is proof. There is also political motivation for
| regulators to crack down on the wild west of online privacy in
| the US (FB scapegoating) and abroad (GDPR and co). If there is
| to be a hard turn by regulators and hardware/OS providers for
| privacy protection and FB does not prepare for it by preparing
| Audience Network to operate without granular personal data,
| their whole business model would be at risk and their terminal
| value threatened. Being prepared for a world placing privacy
| first protects their financial interests, likely even putting
| them ahead of competitors that are going in unprepared.
|
| If voting power at FB was majority owned by Wall Street
| shareholders, you could argue it's unlikely they would hurt
| operating income for years rather than milk it even if it's
| protective long term. But that's not the case, Mark does have a
| super majority and can afford governing for the long term even
| if it makes analysts critical.
| fikama wrote:
| > Before anybody jumps in and yells about how Mozilla is worse
| than Google, let me point out that Firefox is still objectively
| the best browser to use for privacy right now.
|
| So I will be that "anybody". On what do you base your opinion
| about firefox privacy? Because I reading across the web have
| got another impression, for example,
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9374407
| danShumway wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306925
|
| Short version, deficiencies in Chromium and Safari as browser
| _engines_ are large enough that they outweigh most telemetry
| concerns. Browsers like Brave can disable some telemetry,
| sure, but they can 't add in the larger set of features that
| are missing from Chromium. Browser telemetry is worth
| thinking about and considering, but you should be less
| concerned about browser telemetry than you are about Ublock
| Origin performance.
| [deleted]
| jeffwask wrote:
| Mozilla ain't what it used to be.
| strulovich wrote:
| > I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook
| would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard
| or that it would ever do anything other than try to weaken the
| standard.
|
| I don't think that's why you want FB/Meta here. But you want to
| make sure this is useful enough for the ad companies so this
| actually becomes a solution. If you build a super private
| solution no advertising company wants/can use, then you're just
| wasting time.
|
| Assuming the competition is standard built by Google within
| itself, this makes sense.
|
| (Meta employee, don't work on ads, opinions my own)
| danShumway wrote:
| > But you want to make sure this is useful enough for the ad
| companies so this actually becomes a solution.
|
| I guess the question though is: is Facebook going to stop
| delivering ads if the solution isn't good enough? Why is it
| important that Facebook like the system?
|
| Facebook was very upset about Apple's privacy changes, it
| didn't get rid of ads on iOS. It's been very upset about a
| lot of things. What throws me in these conversations is that
| I'm not sure why the solution has to be one that Facebook is
| happy with. What Facebook would be happy with is _as much
| data as they 're allowed to have._ And also, Facebook doesn't
| really have veto powers over what anyone else does, so it's
| not like we need to find a middle ground with the company.
|
| Part of the problem of building a solution that's good enough
| that advertisers won't want more is that it's difficult to
| believe that solution exists. Facebook is pretty clear that
| the constraints on what they'll collect is defined in their
| internal/public privacy policies, and within that constraint
| they will collect as much data as the platform offers.
|
| I'm not aware of any instances of a platform offering an ad
| attribution system that was privacy preserving, and having
| Facebook (or other companies) decide not to do any
| fingerprinting or insert any tracking links into pages, or
| use any cookies on that platform. I also find it really hard
| to believe that if Mozilla cracks down on fingerprinting and
| doesn't provide an alternative that Facebook is happy with,
| that Facebook will stop selling ads.
| tyrfing wrote:
| What's your view on how this proposal compares to Apple's
| PCM? Why is Apple building a similar way for 3rd parties to
| reliably track users if this is overall harmful for users?
|
| > What Facebook would be happy with is as much data as
| they're allowed to have.
|
| Indeed. However, platform owners like Apple and Google are
| currently in a privileged position, where they make rules
| for others to follow but are free to collect any and all
| data they want.
|
| > While we believe that Apple's move to eliminate IDFA was
| done in the spirit of advancing consumer privacy, it may
| ultimately provide Apple with an advertising platform that
| is competitively advantaged vs. peers who don't have access
| to Apple's richer APIs
| danShumway wrote:
| > What's your view on how this proposal compares to
| Apple's PCM? Why is Apple building a similar way for 3rd
| parties to reliably track users if this is overall
| harmful for users?
|
| It's always tricky to talk about Apple's positions on
| privacy. In some areas they are very good, but in some
| areas they are very good at appearing to be very good. I
| think that Apple itself wants to be able to do some level
| of attribution on the web. I think that Apple is under a
| lot more stress from regulators than Mozilla is.
| Obviously Apple has an inherent interest in making it
| look like that's not the case and that they're just
| solely on the side of privacy.
|
| I also think your concern about Apple/Google privileging
| their own platforms is completely accurate. However, I
| don't think that the solution to that is to make privacy
| worse in other areas, I would rather see Apple/Google
| hold themselves to the same standards that they hold
| other companies.
|
| In short, I'm not angry at Apple for the changes it's
| making because they hurt Facebook, I'm angry at Apple for
| either ignoring those changes itself or making sure that
| those changes don't apply to parts of iOS and the web
| that are important to Apple. This has come up a couple of
| times with iOS; it's good that 3rd-party apps have more
| restrictions on tracking, I wish the built-in apps were
| the same.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > Why is Apple building a similar way for 3rd parties to
| reliably track users if this is overall harmful for
| users?
|
| The rest of your comment suggested they want to track
| users.
| skybrian wrote:
| I assume they would be happy if this became a standard that
| Apple buys into, but the real competition is Google's
| proposal. And if that doesn't work out, the status quo
| continuing with tracking via third-party cookies.
| lisper wrote:
| My Bayesian prior is that anything that upsets FB is almost
| certainly a good thing, and vice versa.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, the more upset they are the more likely it is
| that a solution really works.
| reillyse wrote:
| Yea, there seems to be an unwarranted assumption that
| Facebook is somehow a necessary part of the ecosystem. They
| aren't. The internet will continue without them and doesn't
| need them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Expecting advertisers to stop advertising on the Internet
| is like expecting all the billboards on the highway to
| blow down.
|
| Better to work on things like size limits and board-per-
| mile maximums with the billboard manufacturers.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Advertisers, like all entities, are as free to do what
| they like as we allow them to be. They don't have to be a
| part of the conversation, we don't have to care about
| advertisers.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Cutting them out makes it more likely that the resulting
| law won't actually work IMO.
|
| Nobody understands the ad industry better than
| advertisers. Incentivize them to compromise and we're
| more likely to get something that actually works than
| incentivizing them to get creative in finding legal
| loopholes.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The billboards are all virtual. If your interface doesn't
| render them they don't exist, and without colluding with
| advertiser's the size and rate of ads to a system that
| blocks ads is a meaningless number because they are never
| rendered.
|
| The real question is why is my supposedly privacy
| preserving interface colluding with this advertiser at
| all? I do not want them involved in my interface and it
| seems contrary to Mozilla's userbase's interests.
|
| Google at least went to the trouble of building a new
| browser and taking over the market. Facebook hasn't done
| anything to be involved except have money to pay off a
| seemingly corrupt mozzila
| asfdgdthawerh wrote:
| I don't expect advertisers to stop putting up billboards
| and I don't expect them to blow down. I live in a part of
| the world where billboards are _banned_. Likewise, all
| advertisements are banned from my network and any devices
| I manage.
|
| We are under no obligation to negotiate. Destroying the
| whole industry is on the table.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Yes but Firefox is NOT in any position to do that. The
| only ones are Apple via iOS Google through Chrome, and
| the Government and none do these entities have any
| incentive to do so. As such this is the most plausible
| way forward.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm not certain if Apple and Google acting bilaterally
| could actually kill advertising dead - I think, even with
| the enormous power they have, that we'd still need the
| government to come in as a rule setter to accomplish it.
| I think there's too much money on the table for both
| parties to stay honest in the long run for purely
| altruistic reasons.
| asfdgdthawerh wrote:
| quesera wrote:
| > Expecting advertisers to stop advertising on the
| Internet is like expecting all the billboards on the
| highway to blow down.
|
| This is a worthy goal, and has been achieved in some
| jurisdictions. No wind required.
|
| Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, Alaska.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Expecting advertisers to stop advertising on the
| Internet is like expecting all the billboards on the
| highway to blow down.
|
| That's not the expectation at all, in fact quite the
| opposite.
|
| Giving concessions to advertisers doesn't make anything
| change. Anti-fingerprinting is the way you stop
| advertisers from fingerprinting. Nothing else short of
| legislation will work, and even legislation doesn't
| always work in every scenario.
|
| Expecting advertisers to behave just because you gave
| them a more private attribution system is like expecting
| ants to stop going onto your countertops just because you
| put a cupcake on the floor.
|
| The question is, given that Facebook will always take as
| much data as they are able to technically extract from
| the browser, and given that you're correct and
| advertisers are not going to stop advertising on the
| Internet regardless of what restrictions are put up --
| why is it important to make them happy or to give the
| company concessions? Building a system that Facebook is
| happy with won't make its behavior change, so why do we
| care if they like the things we build?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Funny enough, that cupcake trick works for bees (old Boy
| Scout trick: if you're having bee trouble, put some juice
| in a can and set it away from the campsite. Bees will
| gravitate towards the easier target).
|
| But on the topic: at least in the US, if we're talking a
| legal solution, there won't be one that doesn't factor in
| the needs of Fortune 500 companies. And attempts to build
| solutions not factoring them in in Europe got us, well,
| the GDPR and infinite consent dialogs.
|
| Better to bring parties to the table than try to hash a
| solution that pretends they don't have interests here.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Anti-fingerprinting will never be bulletproof.
| Legislation definitely needs to be part of the solution.
|
| More generally, though, I have to ask: do we want an
| ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
| munk-a wrote:
| > Legislation definitely needs to be part of the
| solution.
|
| Yup, that's about where I'm at. Standard Oil wasn't
| broken up because a lot of people made extremely rational
| arguments about how much monopolies hurt long term
| economic health to Rockefeller and he just changed his
| mind. It was broken up because the government stepped in.
|
| Advertising is costing America an intense amount of
| productivity and we're going to need regulations and
| constraints to help restrict it (vermont has greatly
| benefited from said billboard restrictions)
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Advertising is costing America an intense amount of
| productivity_
|
| How so?
| danShumway wrote:
| > do we want an ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated
| peace?
|
| I have yet to see an evidence that a negotiated peace is
| possible, and I have seen a lot of evidence that suggests
| to me that it is impossible.
|
| I personally would rather see hard anti-fingerprinting
| features in browsers, potentially combined with
| legislation to fill in the gaps. I have seen a lot of
| evidence from platforms like iOS, and from web standards
| like deprecating cookies, that advertisers are only
| willing to come to the table after they've already lost,
| and that they only come to the table to weaken existing
| standards.
|
| I have a lot of criticism of Apple, but I look at some of
| the changes in iOS that were made in regards to Facebook,
| and it's hard for me not to conclude that the best ways
| to tangibly improve privacy on platforms like Facebook
| are to just move forward without its permission. I look
| at adblockers the same way, there were no conversations
| about acceptable ads until advertisers thought it was
| possible that adblockers might become widespread.
|
| It's not clear to me what a negotiated peace would entail
| or how to get there, but it is very clear to me how to
| improve anti-fingerprinting measures and how to pass
| legislation. Yes, that means that we're in an arms race,
| but if we understand that advertisers are always going to
| advocate for more tracking, it follows that a theoretical
| negotiated peace would also need to be constantly
| renegotiated over and over again.
|
| Short of burning the industry to the ground and not
| having ads online, which I think is a separate
| conversation, I don't believe there is a stable solution
| to advertising and privacy. Whether it's legislation or
| technology or industry standards, they will always need
| to be defended and reinforced and renegotiated. There
| will always be advertisers arguing that they should be
| more lax. And I think that's part of why the idea of an
| arms race isn't that scary to me, because to me all of it
| is an arms race, including negotiated acceptable ad
| standards.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > More generally, though, I have to ask: do we want an
| ever-escalating arms race or a negotiated peace?
|
| That's not a choice that's being offered. There is no
| reason to expect advertising platforms like Google or
| Facebook to ever be happy with "enough tracking". If they
| can get more information, they will want more, regardless
| of any "negotiations". This has been shown pretty clearly
| with the DoNotTrack header (now itself a tracking
| element), and the GDPR cookie policies.
|
| So the only solution is war on tracking.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines,
| regardless of how strongly you feel about $topic? It's not
| what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
|
| We've already asked you repeatedly not to post flamewar
| comments on HN. Not cool.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jefftk wrote:
| _> ad companies fuck off and die_
|
| Does that include HN? Which is funded by an in-house
| advertising system with job ads that appear as sponsored
| posts?
| MereInterest wrote:
| > If you build a super private solution no advertising
| company wants/can use, then you're just waiting time.
|
| Which is why regulation is needed. Otherwise, any solution
| needs to be more attractive to the advertisers than the
| people they stalk (i.e. everybody else).
| ahmed_ds wrote:
| Is it me or these days major tech non profits feels
| marginally less of an advocate of privacy related matters
| compared EU as a whole? TBH I think GNU failed to make any
| sort of progress in terms of privacy because their ideology
| was always on the extremist side. And all the rest of the
| NGO's kept compromising to meet demands of big tech. Then
| you have the EU, who will just slap fines without
| compromising at all.
|
| Moreover lobbying runs US govt. Tech non profits are
| financed largely by megacorps so they won't necessarily
| bite the hand that feed them.
| dessant wrote:
| We can just outlaw certain types of tracking, your employer
| does not need to be given a seat at the table, nor does it
| deserve one.
|
| Meta will happily use any data they can access about people,
| and this will just be an additional data point that augments
| the extensive behavioral profiles they have on most internet
| users.
|
| This is yet another attempt to not accept no for an answer
| when it comes to data collection, because not getting any
| data on users who refused data collection is unfathomable to
| them.
| cglong wrote:
| FWIW, you can choose to "View final document" which gets rid of
| all the proposed vandalism. Still really bad that the default
| view contains _all_ the proposals.
| jer0me wrote:
| For anyone looking, I'm sure they'll revert it soon:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...
| danShumway wrote:
| I understand why people use Google Docs, it's a very
| convenient platform.
|
| But this is a technical document about browser features, I'm
| a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over a
| proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with markdown
| or something.
|
| I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the
| document is being made publicly available on that platform.
| When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's
| because the standard is seeing active participation. For
| something that is being linked to a public view, I would have
| loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
|
| It's not that it's completely inexcusable, I'm sure Mozilla
| is making use of Google Doc features, markups, contribution
| history, whatever. It is just disappointing to see that
| apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that
| Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-
| hosted one.
|
| It's not the biggest deal in the world, it just feels like a
| bad look to see Mozilla tout that it's built this great
| standard, and then click on the link and get sent to a Google
| Doc. I mean... this article is _about_ privacy, if I 'm
| currently signed into Google and I click on this link, does
| it mean anything that Google now knows I personally clicked
| on it? I know it's not the end of the world, but Mozilla
| literally just finished telling me how good it was at
| anonymizing data, and now it's leaking my reading habits to
| Google in an extremely targeted, de-anonymized form.
|
| ----
|
| [0]: Yes, I know that many standards processes on the web use
| Github, which is also a proprietary SaaS, but at least the
| majority of that process (issue tracker aside) is usable just
| as an endpoint.
| iqanq wrote:
| >But this is a technical document about browser features,
| I'm a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over
| a proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with
| markdown or something.
|
| Then maybe the public SaaS services should be of a better
| quality so that Mozilla employees want to use them.
|
| >I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the
| document is being made publicly available on that platform.
| When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's
| because the standard is seeing active participation. For
| something that is being linked to a public view, I would
| have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.
|
| There is a PDF export for google docs which is available to
| all users. File > Download > PDF.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Then maybe the public SaaS services should be of a
| better quality so that Mozilla employees want to use
| them.
|
| Maybe a company that has been throwing money into dozens
| of random privacy initiatives outside of the browser
| market (some good and some bad) would be a good fit for
| solving that problem? Dogfooding software is a really
| good strategy for UX design after all.
|
| > There is a PDF export for google docs which is
| available to all users. File > Download > PDF.
|
| That's exactly what I mean. Someone wrote this blog post,
| could they have hit the PDF export button and then linked
| to that PDF hosted on Mozilla's servers? That would have
| prevented the vandalism problem they ran into.
|
| The issue I have isn't that I can't export to PDF from
| Google Docs. The issue that I have is that I have to
| visit Google Docs and load a ton of proprietary
| Javascript just so I can hit a PDF export button. Google
| Docs has an API, Mozilla could have a script that's just
| auto-exporting a PDF and hosting it on a public endpoint
| on a regular interval.
| rascul wrote:
| > It is just disappointing to see that apparently there
| isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is
| good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.
|
| Mozilla has been hosting an EtherPad instance for some time
| now, which may have worked in place of Google Docs for
| this.
|
| https://pad.mozilla.org
| dessant wrote:
| A large portion of Firefox development activity is hidden
| away in private documents on Google Docs. They are not
| concerned.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5410
| danShumway wrote:
| Blegh... it's disappointing to see this on the linked
| blogpost, but it's a lot more disappointing to see it for
| wikis directly relevant to a Github repo.
|
| Again, I know that Github is also SaaS, but there's a
| difference. That kind of stuff should be handled
| differently.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| And Jira.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > This issue has been automatically marked as stale
| because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed
| if no further activity occurs.
|
| Sadly that's not the only thing that will be closed if
| Mozilla keep focusing on the wrong things.
| rascul wrote:
| There seems to be access control on it now, as I get "Access
| denied" even while logged in.
| Aachen wrote:
| So to read a proposal about ad tracking from Facebook, we
| need to use Google? There's some irony there I guess.
| Yoric wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've been part of a Mozilla/Facebook
| partnership (on the Mozilla side) on data compression. Having
| two tech companies work together (especially when one of them
| is non-profit) often makes sense.
|
| For this case? I'm sure that there is a good reason. I'm not a
| Mozilla anymore, so I haven't followed that story, but I
| imagine that the rationale is something along the lines of
| "These days, stuff we do in the browser don't have much impact,
| as web standards have been superseded by Chrome. However,
| whenever we manage to convince a big company such as Facebook
| to do even _one thing_ better, we can improve the lives of
| billions of people. "
|
| PR impact might not be good, though.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| At this point, I cannot see any other explanation than the
| whole Mozilla Foundation C-suite being compromised and plants
| by Google. Assuming stupidity only goes so far. A single fuckup
| is incompetence, ten repeated fuckups is malice. If they wanted
| to sink Mozilla, they could not do any better.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't understand why I'm supposed to believe that Facebook
| would ever have beneficial insight to add to a privacy standard
|
| Well, the headline says "privacy preserving attribution for
| advertising". I'm guessing Facebook provides expertise in what
| kind of attribution advertisers want.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > Bigger story here
|
| It's not a bigger story.
|
| THE story - in fact, the REVELATION - here is that Mozilla
| thinks it's OK to cooperate with Facebook on PRIVACY work. You
| can't make this shit up. Not even on hard drugs.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| As other commenters have pointed out, it makes sense to work
| with one of the two largest advertising firms when figuring
| out how to support their advertising needs, while maintaining
| user privacy.
|
| If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards private
| attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
|
| Furthermore, Mozilla is requesting feedback from everyone,
| not just Facebook, which helps keep Facebook (and Mozilla)
| honest in this process.
|
| What alternative would you propose?
| danShumway wrote:
| I think at the very least championing that partnership is
| pretty tone-deaf.
|
| The only people who are excited to see Mozilla partner with
| Facebook are advertisers. I disagree that Mozilla needs
| Facebook's particular input on this, but ignoring that,
| even if we say that they do, I'm still somewhat at a loss
| why they would expect normal readers to be excited about
| seeing Facebook's name pop up in an article title or why
| they would think that's something worth bragging about.
|
| It reads like an article written for advertisers, with some
| fluff (maybe the standard is good, but they're not really
| going into detail) that basically amounts to "also don't
| worry, this isn't that bad for you."
|
| I mentioned this further up above, but regardless of
| whether you like targeted advertising or not, this article
| still doesn't really make the case why I as a user should
| be excited about the idea that attribution should work
| across devices. I don't understand how any of this is good
| for me as a user outside of the broad idea of "ads pay for
| things, so you should care if advertisers are happy."
| freebuju wrote:
| Google's FLoC was proposed openly as this one is. Everyone
| and their grandma was up in arms about it. Why give Mozilla
| a free pass? What is so special about this proposal?
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > If Facebook doesn't use this method, the work towards
| private attribution that Mozilla is doing doesn't matter.
|
| That work already doesn't matter before it begins. There is
| no solution Facebook will support that actually preserves
| user privacy, because their core business model is based on
| broad surveillance.
|
| Any resulting standard will be user hostile and/or useless
| to advertisers.
|
| This makes the endeavor obviously a waste of resources on
| Mozilla's part (unless, of course, they plan on selling out
| their own users to advertisers, in which case it's a great
| first step).
| driverdan wrote:
| > What alternative would you propose?
|
| Stop worrying about what companies want and focus on your
| users. Advertisers are not Firefox users. Firefox users
| want to block ads, not have sanctioned tracking.
| akersten wrote:
| > What alternative would you propose?
|
| How about not working with the fox on the least invasive
| way to eat my fellow hens?
| foxfluff wrote:
| > As other commenters have pointed out, it makes sense to
| work with one of the two largest advertising firms when
| figuring out how to support their advertising needs, while
| maintaining user privacy.
|
| How about not figuring out how to support advertising
| needs? They can just stick to figuring out privacy.
|
| > What alternative would you propose?
|
| They could focus on user needs. Having an ad-blocker by
| default would be a good start. Figuring out how to remove
| advertisers and the incentive to advertise (and thus SEO
| spam etc.) from the internet is a goal I would support.
| freebuju wrote:
| They've taken Google's money before. Why not siphon off Meta
| before the company crashes and gets liquidated. /s
|
| Am glad Mozilla's true commercialization intentions are
| coming full circle. They recently introduced Firefox
| suggest[0]. Maybe they can finally retire the privacy-first
| corporate-goobly talk they have been parading for quite some
| time and join the adtech space as a fresh objectively neutral
| player.
|
| [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-
| firefox-su...
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| Can we crowdfund for the guys of ungoogled chromium to provide
| official reproducible binaries? I feel completely out of luck
| looking for alternatives to Firefox.
|
| Last time a looked ungoogled chromium was being served by whoever
| was willing to build it and upload the binary, this doesn't gives
| me a lot of trust. I also don't have computer power/ Knowledge to
| build this behemoth.
|
| Ps. There will be a lot of shadowbans going on /r/Firefox this
| week. Last time I tried to politely complain there I was almost
| immediately shadowbanned.
| joelbondurant1 wrote:
| 2wrist wrote:
| Ah FFS.
| saberworks wrote:
| Ugh, it's like they're trying to drive users away.
| snthd wrote:
| Part of why I value privacy is because I hate advertising and
| want to obstruct it as much as possible.
|
| It seems Mozilla's values are not my values.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yet another useless thing for uBlock Origin to get rid of. Why
| are browsers going out of their way to help advertisers in the
| first place?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Why? Money.
|
| Mozilla gets hundreds of millions of $ from Google every year?
|
| Any wonder why Mozilla was the last one to jump on the privacy
| bandwagon? And now they are holding hands with another big
| privacy invader.
| [deleted]
| v3ss0n wrote:
| What have you done Mozilla...
| sgift wrote:
| I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it's hard
| to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies.
|
| In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to
| answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the
| Internet should exist?
|
| If the answer is no, that's it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla
| should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow.
| This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that
| they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill
| after all.
|
| If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in
| my mind - a bad actor. There's no way around it. But Facebook is
| also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world.
| So, if a proposal isn't somehow either accepted by Facebook or
| forced on them it is already dead. I don't think Mozilla has the
| market power for the second variant, so only the first one is
| possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of
| the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing
| scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap.
| So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to
| these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice
| people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the
| protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| I believe ads on a website are free speech. If I want to put
| ads on my site it's MY site. Feel free to block the ads or also
| feel free to just not visit but, with rare exceptions, I don't
| won't some regulation about what content I can put on MY site.
|
| Separately, I'm less against regulation that bans sharing data
| but I don't know where to draw the line. It seems reasonable
| for me to keep logs on my site. It seems reasonable to ask my
| friend Brenda who's way better at statistics than me to use my
| logs to tell me insights about my site. Brenda starts an LLC or
| Corp and now suddenly there's regulations? You could say,
| "well, Brenda can't share it" but in the same way, Brenda might
| ask Jill who has better knowledge in certain areas of
| statistics to help out. And so the chain grows.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| You're not just putting ads your site. If that was the case,
| selling banner ads would be fine. What you are doing is
| forcing me into a worldwide tracking network that would make
| the Stasi's wet dreams look like nothing. So, no, it's not
| free speech, it's you personally attacking every single user.
| dTal wrote:
| >This probably also means people have to be willing to accept
| that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the
| bill after all.
|
| I don't buy this. My entire OS is free. Libre and as-in-beer.
| No ads. No telemetry. Much of it even requires nontrivial
| infrastructure to maintain - build farms, package servers - and
| nontrivial human maintenance. A perplexing economic mystery, by
| capitalist standards, and yet here we are. Are websites
| fundamentally different? I say no. In fact I've visited many
| labor-of-love websites with no ads. They tend to be the best
| ones, too.
|
| An ad-free web would sink many business models, to be sure, but
| I can't say I can bring myself to care about that.
| CivBase wrote:
| > Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist?
|
| Yes, but not _targeted_ advertising. The mechanism which serves
| the ad should not try to collect information on the user and
| tailor the ad to them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to
| do that without creating a system that inevitably allow someone
| to identify and track people without their consent.
| ProAm wrote:
| > Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist?
|
| It's not the advertising, is the intrusive, extensive, cross-
| site, cross-industry, non-opt-out, forever tracking that is the
| problem.
|
| We've normalized that the two go hand in hand and are ok.
| m463 wrote:
| The problem is "advertising" is an ambiguous term (like
| "freedom" or "justice") that is used to obfuscate what is
| happening.
|
| Advertising to consumers is "show me a picture of a product"
| yet to the advertising companies it is tracking and forming a
| detailed dossier for every person on the planet and selling it
| to the highest bidder.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| It's not black and white you can do advertising without
| "personalisation."
| hedora wrote:
| Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data and
| non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop.
|
| Yes, that would destroy a few incumbents' business models.
| No, it wouldn't be the end of Google's ad business.
|
| According to multiple press releases I've seen, blocking
| tracking makes ads and marketing about 30% less effective. As
| a society, that'd mean some combination of increasing ad
| impressions by 30% and reducing total ad spend (since
| currently marginal ad campaigns will become unprofitable).
|
| That sounds completely acceptable to me, especially if it
| frees up smart people to work on stuff that actually benefits
| society in some way.
| sgift wrote:
| > Yeah; I'd go further and say that monetizing user data
| and non-consensual tracking should be illegal, full stop.
|
| That would be the ideal outcome for me in an ideal world.
| I'm also convinced it won't happen, so all that remains are
| private efforts.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I still recall the shutting down of the Deck network,
| probably the only ad network that I can name that refuses to
| track users invasively.
|
| From https://web.archive.org/web/20190403051038/http://deckne
| twor...,
|
| > In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on
| large, walled, social networks. The indie "blogosphere" was
| disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly
| fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the
| market. Invasive user tracking (which we refused to do) and
| all that came with that became pervasive, and once again The
| Deck was back to being a pretty good business. By 2015, it
| was an OK business and, by the second half of 2016, the
| network was beginning to struggle again.
|
| The question is more of, in 2022 can we still do online
| advertising without personalization and tracking, in a way
| that's profitable?
| akersten wrote:
| I don't think it's that black and white. Whatever happened to
| "do nothing" and leave things as they are?
|
| We don't need a special FLoC 2.0, just leave the dang web as it
| is, some people will block ads and some won't, and FB will just
| have to deal with it? I'm honestly shocked Mozilla is even
| entertaining this nonsense.
| jefftk wrote:
| FLoC was a proposal for targeted advertising ("how do you
| figure out who to show your ads to?"), and FLoC 2.0 is the
| Topics API proposal: https://github.com/jkarlin/topics
|
| Mozilla's proposal here is for conversion tracking ("how do
| you figure out whether your ads are working?"). It is an
| alternative to proposals by Apple
| (https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-
| meas...) and Google (https://github.com/WICG/conversion-
| measurement-api)
|
| (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for
| myself)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There 's no way
| around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms
| for advertising in the world._
|
| They don't have to be. I've tried to be supportive of Mozilla
| and Firefox, but partnering with Facebook is the straw that
| breaks this camel's back. They're a firm with a history of
| lying that starts at the top. Like attracts like.
|
| Guess it's back to Chromium...
| fartcannon wrote:
| Chromium is worse though. And directly supports Googles plan
| to eliminate competition. Let's see how much you like a
| google only internet? You won't. At all.
|
| The move here is to financially support a fork of Firefox.
| The issue is picking which one.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has
| to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the
| Internet should exist?
|
| There are other questions. What is the evidence Facebook won't
| track as much as possible no matter how much browsers give
| them? Did advertising exist before this kind of tracking?
| kvark wrote:
| I don't think Mozilla is in the right to decide whether
| advertising should exist or not. Firefox provides a fair choice
| - you can install adblocking solutions and mess with your
| content view of the web as much as necessary. But there is
| still value in improving the ethics of advertising that other
| people see.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| > This probably also means people have to be willing to accept
| that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the
| bill after all.
|
| Or decide that 95% of what we consume today is absolutely
| irrelevant and not worth to pay and do something better with
| our lives, like literally anything [insert hobby here].
| akomtu wrote:
| Targeted advertising cannot simultaneously know everything about
| a user_id and respect privacy of that user_id. Every bit of
| privacy is an extra user_id's attribute that could be used for
| more accurate advertising.
| mqus wrote:
| In their defense, this is not really about targeting (afaict)
| but rather understanding how many people saw/clicked on that
| ad.
| aaomidi wrote:
| This isn't really about targeting specific users, rather seeing
| overall aggregated metrics.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've been around since before the web existed and I don't use a
| single Mozilla.
|
| I always install Firefox on a new machine, but it feels.. wrong.
| They keep trying to make it a "consumer" thing, whereas Chrome
| did just fine not doing that. They missed their chance when they
| were no longer the dev/geek standard, not sure who they're
| supposed to be claiming as their core user these days.
|
| This kind of thing definitely won't help.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Last thing I want is my browser helping advertisers
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I'm a big proponent of a competitive open web. This is probably
| just more marketing companies coming up with more tracking
| attributes. I think Mozilla has great tech.
|
| Having said all of that. I don't understand two things:
|
| 1. Ads isn't the only way to make money on the net. So I've never
| understood Mozilla's inability to get away from them (probably
| because they never wanted to).
|
| 2. Why no one else besides Google seems to have the funds to
| build a competing browser engine. Or at least to fund a developer
| team to fork Firefox. While Firefox might not be as plugin-able
| as Chromium, do we need another browser like Chromium or just a
| better lead Firefox?
|
| My concerns aren't with Mozilla but rather maintaining an open
| competitive web through choice and competing engines. "UI Devs
| only test on one browser" commentary be damned.
| comfrey wrote:
| How much did Meta contribute to Moz as a part of the deal?
| acqbu wrote:
| major red flag
| gigel82 wrote:
| "Privacy Preserving" and Meta do not belong in the same sentence.
|
| I guess they want some financial contributions from Meta too
| since Google's don't cover the C-tier compensation bump.
| xaxaxb wrote:
| As a non-profit working on a browser, I don't get what the need
| is to "partner" with an advertising company. It's like they are
| saying ads are necessary evil. But who gains from that? Corps
| obv.
|
| Why not partner with another ad company Google? Oh...because they
| have chrome.
| ekr____ wrote:
| What "partner" in this case means is "Mozilla engineers
| collaborated with Meta engineers on developing this proposal".
|
| We also routinely partner with Google engineers on technical
| proposals, see, for instance: QUIC Version Negotiation.
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-versio...
| xaxaxb wrote:
| Thanks for the response.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| > Mozilla Partners with [Facebook] on Privacy
|
| Okay, until now I gave them some benefit of the doubt. Now
| Mozilla don't even try to hide how hypocritical they are.
| paxys wrote:
| It's not like they have ever hidden it. Pretty much all Mozilla
| revenue comes from their deals with Google.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Why do people insist on using this as a point?? It's just
| guilt by association! Taking Google's money has absolutely
| nothing to do with privacy. Google paid Mozilla to set them
| as the default search engine. That in no way decreases the
| privacy for the user and it gets Mozilla the funding they
| need to develop privacy-enhancing features that do benefit
| the user.
| rvz wrote:
| I mean, in 2007 the CEO of Mozilla saw this 'association'
| as a problem and vowed to not be dependent on Google's
| money and seek other sources of revenue: [0]
|
| > "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says"
|
| > "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the
| millions it collects from the search company each year, if
| that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source
| developer's CEO promised"
|
| 14 years later, it continues to be on life support by their
| own anti-privacy competitors since they cannot make any
| significant revenue sources other than Google's money
| despite promising to 'walk away' years ago. They know that
| they can't be _' privacy-first'_ in their mission statement
| whilst still taking Google's money. Working with Facebook
| on this is another way for Mozilla to abandon it's _'
| privacy-first'_ selling point which at this point is now
| meaningless.
|
| Mozilla will never change. Even after 14 years.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.
| compu...
| paxys wrote:
| Because it _is_ a data point. Sure it isn 't a smoking gun
| pointing to malpractice, but if they are getting $500M/yr
| from Google, getting into partnerships with Facebook, and
| continue to make similar moves down the line, you have to
| question where they can truly be independent enough to be
| 100% on the consumer's side.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| How is that a real data point? Like you said, it just
| raises questions, it doesn't actually tell you anything.
| Literally all you're doing is casting vague aspersions.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Why? Mozilla was one of the last companies giving people what
| they want, which is a web browser without tracking and without
| bloat. This to me feels like Mozilla's management has abandoned
| the values that made me choose them over Chrome.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I assume this is another cash grab by Mozilla executives as they
| squeeze the last of the value out of the movement they've tanked.
| mfrw wrote:
| "In a shocking turn of events:" -- That's what I would say
| without even reading!
| Macha wrote:
| If Mozilla's browser supports a way for advertisers to track me,
| be it for attribution, fraud prevention, targeting or any other
| person, then what is the point in using it over ungoogled-
| chromium? Mozilla's reputation in my view has sure taken a
| beating these last few years, and without the details of the
| proposal (thanks to their own fuckup), it's hard not to assume
| the worst.
| sneak wrote:
| The security (specifically sandboxing) hardening of ungoogled-
| chromium is also substantially beyond firefox's.
|
| Ungoogled Chromium is my daily driver.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Have you found a replacement for profile-sync, assuming you
| ever found such a thing useful? It's what keeps me on google-
| chrome vs chromium atm.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't sync anything browser related between my devices,
| sadly. This isn't as much of an issue with the current
| travel landscape, but I've a new m1max and the last omicron
| wave seems to be starting to recede globally, so I'm going
| to have to find a solution.
|
| I might just manually copy the profile directory to my
| laptop when I leave, and copy the newer one back to my
| desktop when I get home. Mutex! TBH I can really only be
| using one browser at a given time so "sync" seems like
| overkill as long as I've only two hands and two eyeballs.
| drsnow wrote:
| As a Firefox user, under what circumstances would that make a
| difference though? How often do Firefox users get exploited
| by malware or whatever that Chrome users would be protected
| from due to improved security? Can you give an example?
| Genuine questions.
| [deleted]
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What does ungoogled-chrome do to prevent advertiser tracking? I
| think you're confusing the unbundling of Google services with
| general tracking on the web, which this proposal aims to
| replace.
|
| Unless using an ad blocker your browser is not doing anything
| to actively prevent it, and there is no meaningful difference
| between chrome / Firefox / edge there.
| errantmind wrote:
| If there is no way to disable this 'feature', I will stop using
| Firefox entirely.
| staticassertion wrote:
| And, as with DNT, by disabling it you'll just add another
| feature for identifying you.
| Macha wrote:
| 1 bit seems pretty preferable to something which people
| will pretty quickly find a way to turn into a user ID
| staticassertion wrote:
| Maybe - it depends on how much that bit is weighted.
| rascul wrote:
| I thought it was the other way around. As it was generally
| disabled by default, enabling it gave another data point
| for fingerprinting. But maybe I don't recall correctly.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Either way it works. It's just a feature. What the big
| issue was was that some browsers would enable it by
| default and some wouldn't, and then you'd have
| differences across versions, etc. So it became a more
| powerful feature.
| ekr____ wrote:
| There was a discussion in PATCG Wednesday about precisely
| this topic.
|
| Briefly, it should be possible to "disable" this feature by
| instead encrypting a random match key, which would look the
| same as having it enabled but merely not be useful for
| measurement. Obviously, one would need to work through the
| details of how to make this work in a complete protocol, so
| this is a little handwavy, but it's definitely a
| consideration.
| staticassertion wrote:
| That's good to hear - that was such a silly flaw in DNT,
| along with the entire concept being idiotic.
| mindslight wrote:
| I don't see any other way to do DNT without creating an
| extra facet of identifying information. It's entire point
| is to convey that information. Contrast with say "allow
| notifications" which lots of privacy advice says to leave
| to "ask" otherwise you needlessly add an identifying
| facet. That preference should be invisible to the
| sandboxed program, with unwanted notifications just going
| to /dev/null.
|
| Also DNT is not useless modulo new human rights
| legislation like the GDPR. I would hope that data
| protection regulators settle on seeing DNT as an explicit
| sign of non-consent, and punish websites who try to
| fraudulently obtain consent with annoying popups etc.
| [deleted]
| mleonhard wrote:
| Ad networks do three things to boost efficiency:
|
| 1. Attribution
|
| 1. Tailoring
|
| 1. Detecting fraud
|
| An ad network without any of these will be less efficient than
| its competitors. It will attract fewer ad buyers. Currently, all
| three of these things require tracking.
|
| Ad networks can use attribution to detect some fraud on popular
| sites & apps. This doesn't work for the long-tail of small sites
| and apps that don't generate many clicks.
|
| Ad buyers could buy ads directly from popular sites/apps. This
| just shifts the burden of detecting fraud from the ad network
| (which has the expertise to do it) to the ad buyer. This excludes
| small sites & apps, slowing the rate of innovation.
|
| The proposals for privacy-preserving ad tailoring all provide
| coarse tailoring (example: "interested in bicycles"). They do not
| allow precise tailoring like "interested in bicycle brand X
| product model Y". Precise tailoring is very efficient.
|
| I welcome all work on privacy-preserving ad-tech for these three
| areas: attribution, tailoring, and fraud-detection. It doesn't
| matter who develops a proposal. Let's examine the proposal and
| evaluate it on its merits. Eventually, we may end up with some
| combinations of techniques that allow efficient privacy-
| preserving ads.
| jevoten wrote:
| I am unable to view the linked overview [1] of this privacy
| preserving technology - Google demands I sign in to view the
| document. Not a good start.
|
| [1]
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks... -
| omitting the "/edit" suffix does not help
| Sophira wrote:
| My guess is that this is because it was publicly editable and
| was being vandalised, according to this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306105
|
| Feels like it would have been better for them to make it view-
| only/editable by specific people rather than hiding the entire
| thing, but there you go.
| jevoten wrote:
| I'm sure they had practical reasons, but the point is that
| privacy wasn't even _considered_.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Somewhat glad to have moved on to Safari about a year ago
| (decade-long Firefox user).
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| The link labeled "IPA overview" is NSFW.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Prio is very awesome. It's homomorphic encryption that allows for
| aggregate statistics and an auditable, and potentially vetoable,
| queries. No one can run a query and get valid data back unless
| all parties agree.
|
| When I was at Mozilla I was wanting to use Prio as a privacy
| layer for federated learning, and audience interest statistics
| for advertising. Looks like someone finally listened.
|
| Congrats team.
| [deleted]
| annadane wrote:
| Just to clarify - ublock origin is going to continue working the
| same way... right?
| ekr____ wrote:
| As I noted above, this is just a document at the moment, so
| it's not in Firefox at all. With that I said, ublock origin
| blocks ads before they are loaded, so I would not expect an API
| of this type to affect it.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| The fox and the weasel partnered on chicken preserving policy for
| the henhouse.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| I would love to have ears on the internal dev channels right
| about now.
| Aachen wrote:
| Particularly their DM chats: bossmang might be in the channels
| and (might need to) have different opinions from the actual
| devs.
| leokennis wrote:
| So now there is only one browser that won't track you, and it's
| Safari.
| ekr____ wrote:
| Two clarifying points:
|
| 1. This is a technical proposal. It has not been incorporated
| into Firefox; I don't think there are even patches for it at
| this point.
|
| 2. Safari actually already implements a different technology
| designed to achieve somewhat similar objectives.
| https://webkit.org/blog/11529/introducing-private-click-meas...
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why even bother with Mozilla at this point? Partnering with the
| one of the top sources of spyware?
| suby wrote:
| Clearly not something being done for the benefit of the users. I
| don't want any of my information (supposedly anonymized or not)
| from my browser leaking to advertisers if I can help it, and here
| my browser provider is taking steps to help facilitate this
| transfer. I'm really losing trust with Mozilla between moves like
| this, their in-browser advertising, their continual re-enabling
| of the user studies telemetry writing over my disabling of it
| (has happened at least 3x times).
|
| You can't monetize your users if they all stop using your
| browser, Mozilla. We need an alternative.
| chobytes wrote:
| mozilla is continuing to burn up the last shreds of any good will
| they acquired a decade ago.
| thekingofh wrote:
| Here's the problem with aggregation. Even if the if is not
| attributable to you as an individual the data can still be used
| as a weapon against you. I'll give an example: Imagine that you
| are a gay person living in a country that kills gay people by
| law. If gay people are frequenting websites that indicate they
| like to hang out at a particular bar, this gives authorities more
| than enough to target that group while still not using your
| personal data directly. The indirect aggregated data is just as
| harmful as if they had targeted you personally. This is where
| companies try to fool you into thinking you are safe to give them
| a "non identifiable" advertising id and aggregating your data
| before selling it. It's not safe.
| kmlx wrote:
| > Imagine that you are a gay person living in a country that
| kills gay people by law. If gay people are frequenting websites
| that indicate they like to hang out at a particular bar, this
| gives authorities more than enough to target that group while
| still not using your personal data directly.
|
| 1. what's stopping current governments doing exactly that right
| now?
|
| 2. how much of the market do you think fits that scenario?
|
| 3. what's stopping people in that scenario trying to protect
| themselves via the usual methods independent of whatever
| browser they choose?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| > We've been looking to apply privacy preserving advertising
| technology to the attribution problem, so that advertisers can
| get answers to important questions without harming privacy.
|
| You're probably going to find that any "solution" to the problem
| involves violating their consent. People don't want their
| movements tracked and sold to the highest bidder - regardless of
| how many different ways you slice it up.
|
| If you give users a real choice in the matter without obscuring
| it or providing UI friction the users will choose not to have
| their data tracked and sold.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Checks date: No, it's not April 1st. Which would have been a fine
| day to make this announcement and possibly get away with it.
|
| In case you were still on the fence... Mozilla has been trying
| very hard to eradicate the enormous amount of goodwill they built
| up over the year. Oh, and it's _Facebook_ , not 'Meta'.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I think it's Meta now. There was a video where Zuckerberg
| dressed up like Steve Jobs and described Second Life.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They're not fooling me. These whitewashes should be ignored,
| and the name should simply always be prepended by the name
| under which the entity is generally known. Otherwise the
| likes of Blackwater get to pretend they are Xe or Academi or
| some other nice clean corporate identity.
|
| Google gets a little bit of leeway because their holding
| really acts as a holding but in the case of Facebook it is
| just so you don't immediately associate the name 'Meta' with
| something vile and ugly.
|
| 'Facebook partners with Mozilla' has a different ring to it.
| [deleted]
| driverdan wrote:
| This is user hostile and a betrayal. Firefox users have never
| asked for ad tracking. On the contrary, I'd guess most Firefox
| users are actively blocking ads. How can anyone at Mozilla
| honestly justify this?
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