

Firefox to Serve Up Ads Based on Browsing History - pykello
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484555,00.asp

======
t1m
We designed Suggested Tiles to respect user privacy. Instead of centrally
collecting as much data about as many people as possible (the strategy of all
other ad-tech companies), we distribute all possible ads to all users and let
Firefox decide what to show. This prevents your data "leaking", while showing
you relevant advertising that you can control.

The user interface is designed to help you understand why you are seeing the
ad, and to allow you to easily and permanently disable this type of
advertising from your experience.

Our goal is to provide effective, relevant advertising without sacrificing
user privacy.

For those interested in the transparency of this, all of the server-side
software for this is on github:

[https://github.com/mozilla/splice](https://github.com/mozilla/splice)
[https://github.com/mozilla/onyx](https://github.com/mozilla/onyx)
[https://github.com/mozilla/infernyx](https://github.com/mozilla/infernyx)

And tracked openly on Bugzilla:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Content%20S...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Content%20Services)

~~~
mister_m
Why does this exist in the first place? How do you justify showing ads?

~~~
t1m
It is true that one of the motivations is to diversify our revenue stream;
almost all of our revenue comes from our Search (advertising) deal with Yahoo.

The real reason we are doing it is because modern digital advertising sucks,
and we are going to change how it works.

The current ad-tech 'environment' invades your privacy, robs publishers, and
delivers deplorable performance for the brand. The only winner right now is
the middle-men; the 'programmatic' exchanges and the various money siphons
that trade your personal data.

We want to fix that. We are starting by building an ad targeting mechanism in
the browser that you can easily control and that doesn't leak your data.
Currently, ads will be shown only on the Newtab page, though one could imagine
a generalized future version of this capability opened up to all internet
publishers.

~~~
mister_m
How can I turn it off? This is completely off-putting and frankly, to me, no
better than the nonsense amazon referral stuff in the Unity lens.

