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I have seen a lot of anger about and criticism of @mozilla's new #adtech attribution system introduced in #Firefox 128. I totally understand why people are worried about this but I'd be curious if anyone has provided *technical* reasons for why the proposed attribution system isn't in fact #privacy-preserving or other reasons why it's bad (beyond "Firefox shouldn't do #ads" or "opt-out is not enough").
I mean there are good reasons to oppose #advertising as such (including online) but, if one acknowledges that ads play at least some legitimate role in financing online services, isn't Mozilla's proposal a good attempt in building a #TrackingFreeAds system? If not, why (real question)?
@ilumium The question reduces to did the USER BASE ask for the feature and for the feature to be on by default? If not then the reasons are due to someone else's goals and they are not aligned with regular folk.
I have been shopping for replacements for a while now and am sad that good projects get subverted because of pressure and greed.
HTML5 has DRM baked in. Firefox has binary blobs (proprietary codecs) almost forced onto you. The situation is not good for the common man.
@kallemp I hear you but if you're an org of the size of Mozilla, user base demands cannot be the only consideration. Mozilla is just as obligated towards its employees and the long-term survival & funding of its work.
@ilumium Yeah. The problem is that the people who have invested blood, sweat, tears and time into developing the whole system have done it mostly as volunteers (bug reports, bug fixes, beta testers, campaigning, advocacy and including it into other open source distributions. THEY DO NOT PROFIT FROM ADVERTS yet they are expected to take it in the rear when a elite segment of the team DECIDES that adverts will be OPT OUT.
So while I understand how it has happened I do not agree with it in any way. It has also been shown that open source systems get hijacked by commercial interests when possible by guiding them into using proprietary standards or code or merging with other commercial tools or standards like happened with the skilled plugin developers for FireFox that were stolen and the skills were spread into the commercial browsers with nothing in return except a more restrictive platform. Perhaps paranoid security was increased but flexibility was lost just to suck up to the other platforms.
FireFox is probably not evil (yet) but they are not their own man any longer and eventually something new will have to rise to take their place if they continue down that road and then the team breaks up and suffers because of corporate greed.
@ilumium @kallemp I think there’s an argument to be made that growing the organization to this size is not good stewardship of the browser. A smaller organization putting funding into an endowment that could ultimately make it self-sustaining would, IMO, be preferable to one that spends hundreds of millions on unfocused efforts while remaining beholden to the world’s largest ad company for 80% of its revenue.
@ilumium The problem is that most real-world privacy threats from advertising are at the group level, not the individual level. Tracking at the group level (with all the interesting math properties of "privacy-preserving" systems) can still help
* match scammers to likely victims
* enable price discrimination
* make housing and job ads disappear for members of protected groups
The math in the new #firefox ad feature is neat but doesn't address the fundamental issues
@dmarti Thanks a lot, very good point indeed!