
Mozilla tries ads in Firefox again, now powered by Pocket recommendations - amelius
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-tries-ads-in-firefox-again-now-powered-by-pocket-website-recommendations/
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Rjevski
They are loosing market share more and more and yet they go on with this
stupidity.

Part of the market share loss is average users switching to Chrome - they
can't do much about that, but the power users group is (or was) Mozilla's best
asset, and yet they're pissing off that group with pretty much every release.

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breakingcups
Well shit. Who wants to bet on when the first ad-removal fork appears?

"now Firefox itself will offer new recommendations to sponsored sites based on
your browsing history. It performs that assessment privately in the browser,
Mozilla said." I don't believe this can ever be water-tight. Where do the ads
get fetched from? Won't anyone who is able to snoop on that request (be it
Mozilla, an ad network or (in case of an https failure) a third party) be able
to deduce privacy-compromising information from the ad being requested itself?

Eg. If an advertisement is requested for a baby-crib (or a wider baby-
category), you an as an advertiser deduce that the other end might (soon) be a
parent.

The fact that Mozilla thinks it's able to preserve privacy by doing it in-
house scares me. I don't want to trust _any_ company with my browsing history
or the processing thereof. If Mozilla decides it's in the ad business itself,
I don't care how they initially try to preserve privacy by generating profiles
in the browser itself. They will become an ad company with the same perverse
incentives as Google and all the other advertising companies.

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RunningDroid
I don't think anyone will make an ad removal fork because the ads are trivial
to disable.

[https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
reco...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
recommendations#sponsoredstories)

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shabbyrobe
Firefox was the last of the players that mattered that could still be
described as a "user agent". That's no longer true.

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RunningDroid
What the article doesn't mention is these ads don't show up if the
"Recommended by Pocket" checkbox in the New Tab Preferences is unchecked.

[https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
reco...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
recommendations#sponsoredstories)

