- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
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So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
- Those of us that fight against ads, tracking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)
If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!
I agree.
Imagine a world where Chrome doesn’t exist and instead Firefox + privacy preserving attribution is the default for all of the people who won’t listen to your reasons why they shouldn’t use chrome or say “I don’t need privacy, I have nothing to hide”.
It seems like Mozilla is trying to do the browser equivalent of shifting the overton window and I’m for that.
However I’ll be monitoring them very very closely.
Ya this is definitely one to maintain some skepticism about. People are criticizing the API’s security in other posts.
Sadly, tracking is the only way to perform attribution without help from the browser. Tracking is terrible for privacy, because it gives companies detailed information about what you do online. While Firefox includes many privacy protections that make it more difficult for sites to track you online (Enhanced Tracking Protection, Total Cookie Protection, Query Parameter Stripping, and many other measures), there’s a huge incentive for sites to find ways around these in order to perform attribution. Our hope is that if we develop a good attribution solution, it will offer a real alternative to more objectionable practices like tracking.
“Our hope is, that if we transfer the bank robber some of our money in advance, they’ll not come in and rob all of it.”
No! Jail the fucker!
While I appreciate your sentiment, this just isn’t realistic in the current state of the world. First, you need to make these kind of tactics illegal enough to incarcerate a person. Second, you need to expand and enforce this law globally. We definitely need this level of global cooperation, but are also soooo far away from achieving it
I mean they don’t have to literally jail advertisers (although I’d love that). I’d agree with hefty fines. Which, while not perfect, several EU laws have shown is possible unilaterally (e.g. Apple allowing third party app stores in the EU, albeit kicking and screaming).
I agree that it’s a mountain to climb, but we sure won’t reach the summit if we walk in the other direction.
The EU is a large enough governing body to have a significant global impact. And I truly appreciate the progress it makes on important subjects.
However, it’s still not effective enough. Apple doesn’t allow third party app stores in countries outside the EU.
The EU can’t “save” the rest of the world alone, true. All I’m saying is it doesn’t necessarily require the entire globe to cooperate to outlaw something just because it’s on the Internet. And that Mozilla scheme won’t save you either.
Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.
I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.
Wow. I 100% agree with you here.
There’s an element of trust when you buy a product. You trust that the product itself isn’t malicious and is intended to help you in some way. E.g. “This food is safely prepared and won’t poison me.” Harvesting user data and advertising really violate that trust.
Though it is worth noting that we don’t buy web browsers. We simply use them for “free“.
You’re not wrong.
Whether you like it or not a lot of the internet relies on advertisement to work.
Some sites can introduce subscription fees and they can get out of it (I’d personally like that), some sites aren’t really sites but just optimising towards ad revenue (with all the shady practices that follow), but most produce valuable content for their users and rely on advertisement to sustain themselves.
So if we want to find a way to support that large center group, without enabling the crappy bottom tier, we have to make profiling safer. Well we don’t have to, we can dream of a safer, better world and try to bring it about by creating revolutions, but if we are practical, creating something that enables what the advertisement industry would like, without destroying what the users would like, is a far more realistic approach to making the world better.
Exactly. There is a general need to destroy and rebuild a system but it is often dangerous and costly. Especially with regard to a system of laws and government. Improving the system more naturally is far more safe and more achievable at smaller scales.
You’re absolutely correct.
Some folks here just want to ban ads outright, but don’t stop to think what that would mean. The one that frightens me is what happens to the already crumbling news industry when they additionally lose all advertising revenue? And don’t say subscriptions, because those won’t come close to cutting it. Maybe a couple outlets like the Times could survive, but all the others are going under.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
Doesn’t work with total cookie protection anyway.
Exactly. It sounds like Mozilla is trying to protect those that aren’t willing or able to protect themselves. It’s a noble reason to do just a little bit of evil. This is roughly the source of my mixed feelings on the subject.
WTH, Mozilla 🤦🏼♀️
Also, fuck you, dude:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
“You’re too dumb to understand so we make decisions for you”
Fuck that condescending prick with a pineapple.
Chill; he’s probably not talking about you. He is talking about “your mom”. If you want her to use Firefox, it’s got to be simple.
Opt-in IS simple. Mom just won’t opt in.
But this PPA stuff doesn’t need to be enabled by default. They are opting-in all Firefox users to something they don’t understand.
If you can’t explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don’t truly understand it.
String theory. Go.
How long is it?
Bah, that’s such a lame hot take.
Tonnes of things are really complicated to explain because they’re complicated.
It’s a paraphrased quote from Richard Feynman
I know. But it’s wrong.
I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task.
IMO that just means they barely understand it themselves. Anyone that understands something with an amount of proficiency can explain it to a
childlayman and it’ll make sense, given they don’t use technical nomenclature.*Layman is a better term. Children are… complicated.
The difficulty is in spinning it to sound non invasive. And of course takes a level of self corruption to even want to do that, since PPA is invasive and you have to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
i read that as more like “nobody would opt in if it was opt-in”.
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.
Let’s not forget when they shipped a full page ad for a Disney movie into a browser update
Lol what? I gotta find this
Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?
IMO it’s the option in
Data collectioncalledMarketing data. It doesn’t say it’s PPA outright, but it sounds like the same sort of thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯The Fennec fork on android may be worth looking into
It’s a desktop only feature, it hasn’t been built into mobile I believe
Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀
Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.
Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry
No thanks, I’ll pass
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I wish I could. Every time I hear about a React app, it’s some godforsaken ad choked nightmare of a “web 2.0” site that just makes the internet painful to use. I understand it may be possible to write a performant and usable GUI with it, but you never hear of such things
Web 2.0 was the mid-2000s idea that every website and service would be accessible via an http api and that it would allow easy integration. It was ads that killed Web 2.0, as users accessing a site via its api rather than its ad-filled website wouldn’t see any of those ads.
God I miss Web 2.0. The Fediverse is trying to bring that concept back, luckily.
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You’re literally using a website based on react technology right now. Lemmy is built on Inferno which is just an older version of React.
No ads but horrible performance. How is it that a iPhone 15 Pro is too slow to run this web site reliably? Why can it not remember that I’m logged in, or worse, why does it sometimes remember I’m logged in, after deciding I’m not? Why does it use so much storage on my phone? Why does it sometimes get stuck trying to draw the Home Screen?
I mean, it’s much better than Reddit was, and I try not to complain for the price, but it really seems like one of those things where it’s too ambitious and just doesn’t work as well for users. Maybe something simpler would be better
I have none of these issues
Try out Voyager or one of the other iOS apps. I use it on an iPhone that’s older than yours (13 pro) and it’s always smooth and responsive.
why does it sometimes remember I’m logged in, after deciding I’m not
I had that problem when Lemmy was under constant DDoS attacks, almost a year ago.
iPhone 15 Pro is too slow to run this web site reliably
You have both upvotes and downvotes so I will assume you are not the only one with these problems. In my experience Reddit website either glitches itself or glitches Safari every now and then.
Why does it sometimes get stuck trying to draw the Home Screen
Sounds like iOS issue, not Lemmy.
Programming languages isn’t adware made by a company that has horrible track records for respecting privacy. If you love Facebook so much, stay there and take your sealioning with you.
This is not sealioning lmao
You’re falling into the trap where anyone who disagrees with you has some sort of ulterior motive or grand scheme. I don’t need to remind you why that is not a good thing.
Enjoy Facebook.
Blocked
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“Hating on anything the Nazis did is stupid because they can build ok cars”
Doing one ok thing doesn’t negate the fact that Meta is one of the most evil, unethical hellholes of a company. Anything they touch is absolutely rotten.
I’d rather not use products made by companies that influence voters and led to a genocide. Sorry I have moral standard.
Browsers are an unsustainable mess of reckless feature creep. At some point we may all transition from using websites at all.
Transition to what exactly?
Away from the all-in-one solution browser to using apps for each discrete feature. Like using a video player already on the OS to play videos or using a Gemini capsule to navigate to text-only “sites”.
So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?
Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.
Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?
Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.
Just use LibreWolf; I’m not up to speed on this stuff but I more or less believe the hype that it will protect my privacy simply by taking Firefox and adding an ad blocker for me and disabling all the shit for me
A custom user.js might be a good base to work off of. For example https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox
But jumping ship might be your best bet. Forks like Librewolf are good or otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser can work well too.
otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser
With manifest v3 and this thing active on chromium browsers, privacy respecting chromium may not exist.
Some browsers have built in adblock (by reimplementing mv2 apis or otherwise) and cut out the hangouts plugin or let you disable it
Not all, but a couple
For now, that’s possible. But for how long? When mv2 came out, we had a few hold off as long as they could, but now they’re all v2 or v3. New technology will always kill the old, whether or not it’s better. It’s only a matter of time. Going with a browser that has consistently made anticonsumer decisions because a different browser has made a few, doesn’t seem like the sensible choice here. Granted, we should have a browser that hadn’t made any such decisions, but we don’t yet have one that I’m aware (I hope I’m wrong).
Totally agree, unfortunately it’s a question of whether Chromium forks can’t keep up with cutting out Google stuff comes before or after Mozilla and/or their rendering engine falls apart.
Fingers crossed for Ladybird + Servo
I’m still holding out for Mozilla. They’ve gone all “corporate” lately, but they weren’t always that way. Ladybird does look like a good project.
So is it safe to assume that alternate builds of Firefox (Pale Moon et al) will be probably removing that “feature” ?
Probably in your best interest to read their release notes
Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.
All your heroes are dead.
“The worst thing that can happen to your people is for them to fall into the hands of a hero”
- Dr Pardot Kines
New saying:
Kill all your heroes.
Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?
Edit: I just did that
Honest question, why does the fediverse like firefox so much? This is not a common opinion to have on the internet, but everyone here and on mastodon seems to have it.
Because it is FOSS and responsible for many great contributions to apis that make the web what it is. It has history that goes way back. It has been decently transparent, certainly when compared to its closest competitors. It isn’t Google. It has a massive library of extensions. They aren’t planning to deprecate manifest v2.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like other browsers and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from the servo reboot. But Firefox is bread and butter and there is often drummed up nonsense about it.
Mozilla also maintains fantastic JS docs
Because otherwise you’d be supporting the Chromium monopoly, and that’s the biggest sin imaginable in the Fediverse.
I’m not in favor of talking about the Fediverse like it is a data monopoly like META or reddit. Lots of people make this place work in operations and content. Seems not that cool to slam them.
Sin? I just want there to be competitors.
Firefox is the competition… To market dominated Chromium.
…yes?
Safari user sitting quietly in the corner
Here’s the best part to that. Safari’s back end is called WebKit. At one point in time it was considered best in class. It was also the backend for Chrome as well for awhile.
Chrome still uses WebKit.
They forked it into Blink a long time ago now. They’ve diverged significantly since then.
To disable:
user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);Alternatively you can do the same through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Website Advertising Preferences and uncheck “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement”
Yup, but that’s already mentioned in the article. Thought I’d give people the exact userpref, so they can modify their custom
user.jsif they have one.
Done. Thanks!
Default Firefox is becoming more and more unusable. I hope distros will start switching to something like Librewolf as the default browser in the future or heavily (and visibly) change the default Firefox config themselves.
