Mozilla's title, "A free and open internet shouldn't come at the expense of privacy", is very misleading about the content of the article. In plain speech, the article's about Mozilla looking for new ways to deliver ads in web browsers. Maybe this is a suitable place for mods to override the original title and write a non-deceptive one.
edit: Here's a few other threads on the same topic (of Mozilla's advocacy of a "privacy-preserving attribution", or "interoperable private attribution", of browser ads):
It is a lie on part of Mozilla. A logic that only makes sense with a lot of false premises, like the necessity and inevitably of surveillance advertising. A simple legislative change and all that would be illegal without it hitting the economy at all with exception of some parts of the advertising industry.
I don't know what changed for Mozilla, but this doesn't look like a way into the future.
Or maybe they want to go that way, but they then should release Firefox/Thunderbird from ambitions like these. These project had other goals than what Mozilla today espouses.
I've changed the term "advertising" for "being racist" in one of their paragraphs to better highlight how the disconnections in this article makes me feel:
"We started [being racist] because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-respecting, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can’t just ignore [being racist] — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in [being racist] over the past few years."
You don't fix a problem by becoming part of it. "Those who fight monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters".
> We can’t just ignore [being racist] — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in [being racist] over the past few years.
You know, the websites where I was insulted and mistreated the most were also websites where memes were the funniest and advice the most effective. These are two sides of free speech; you can't have creativity and originality if you ban all posts that break certain culture's decorum.
To play the monster's advocate: There could be a hypothetical version of advertising that benefits society, the companies and the customers simultaneously. A sort of match-making between people having problems/searching for something and the solutions to them that are cost-efficient and in their interest. The thing that people do casually when someone mentions a problem/wanting a book or whatever and someone else recommending a solution, but more professional in that it also helps them picking somewhere between the cheapest and luxury options that they'll want.
But even if such a thing existed (independent product review agencies are the closest I guess) and they reaped a significant fraction of the gains from trade there'd still be the question how those gains would then end up funding other free content.
> To play the monster's advocate: There could be a hypothetical version of advertising that benefits society, the companies and the customers simultaneously.
That only would happen if Mozilla plan was to bring the ad revenue to the developers, not to Google (or themselves). There is no benefit to society to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars to Google, Facebook and the likes.
Well ideally everyone should gain from this 4-way arrangement: the producer making a transaction they would otherwise not have made, the consumer covering their need efficiently/wasting less time on something/consumer surplus, the site operator participating in allowing the advertiser to gather the data necessary to make the recommendation and the advertisier getting a commission for for coordinating all that.
Of course in the real world we get more of a mexican standoff than enlightened tradepartners coming mutually beneficial agreements.
Moz partnered with one of the most [racist groups] to produce it, and it looks very similar to what another huge [racist group] was doing, except that [group] got criticized because we already knew it was [racist].
If more [racists] move over from the [fully racist KKK] to [the half-racist new organization] than [non-racists] move from [not being racist] to [the half-racist new organization] it is a net reduction.
If the existence of [the half-racist new organization] provides [political] impetus to [outlaw the fully racist KKK] then that's very good.
Can you please concretely say whether you support Mozilla's actual ad tracking, and your reasons? That's better than alleging something is true by repeating "if" over and over.
You have decades of information to make an informed decision on Thomas Robb's KKK. To say something like "I support Thomas Robb if he reduced racism" is to float the idea that the Grand wizard of the Klan can be instrumental in reducing racism.
I would also appreciate if you did not keep repeating "if [baseless assertion]" over and over. It doesn't help move the conversation forward, and you might unintentionally be invoking the illusory truth effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Through all the discussions of privacy and online advertising, I don't think I've ever actually seen the focus put specifically on the fact that targeted advertising online is really the problem.
Websites could ship with advertising that mimics print ads - the same ad is shown to everyone and the ads are targeted based only on the overall content of the site and the general market that is likely to browse it.
Advertising can absolutely still exist online, targeting should simply not be possible. That would mean losing a ton of functionality online as well, but it can be done.
Get rid of cookies entirely and get rid of or at least minimize the number of headers that identify a browser and OS. Authentication would need to be handled differently for many sites, but that's a solvable problem.
Even if you remove cookies, you can still be identified. Your browser is very, very leaky with the information it provides(probably by design, since all the major web browsers are in the pockets of the worlds largest ad distribution networks, one way or the other).
That's actually why I included a note on removing or severely limiting headers sent like user-agent strings. There are occasional uses for those when there are actually client-specific differences, but those are few and far between outside the embedded space.
Add it to the list of obvious examples where browser vendors are disingenuous. Saying they care about privacy while sending a long list of identifiable information is disingenuous at best.
That's called demographic targeting. you identify your advertising audience, match it with known audiences of content, and then go sponsor that content.
it's already proved it is most cost effective and had higher sales conversion.
but there are other factors at play. and everyone wants data. the entire system works now by denying publishers of any advertisement revenue by demographic targeting and forcing them to be the data extractors since they are the ones luring users in.
Mozilla is also a victim of this. they had to implement all changes google ever asked of them, and now this is their meta allegiance pledge. expect meta to pick their tab soon.
Even without the targeting, advertising is still psychological manimpulation trying to get you to act in someone elses best interest instead of your own. Why would you allow that in your computer in any form?
Your premise is wrong. Much advertising is trying to get you act in a way that is in both the advertiser's best interest and your best interest.
For example the ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores advertising items that are on sale. They often inform me that some item I was already planning to buy, but at another store, is available for cheaper at their store.
I win by saving money on my groceries that week and they win be getting sales that they would have otherwise gone to a competing store. It's the competing store that loses.
To put it another way for those who don't web-dev much. Getting rid of cookies completely _requires_ that any authenticated experience becomes an SPA (e. g. only works with JavaScript enabled). The sole alternative available today is to include the session identifier in the URL, which means the end user cannot share links safely and that anything that logs the URL logs the session key. Everything that browser makers are suggesting as a replacement for cookies also requires JS to function.
We could also go back to basic auth. No idea how long browsers keep your login to be resend every time, but they do so as it seems. So you don't have to type in you login on every refresh at least. But yeah, any known convenience would die without any and all cookies.
The hot take here, and one I'd be really interested to see proven wrong, is that we can't have cookies and privacy online.
User authorization is a very specific use case. Cookies are a generic solution, if we only care about that one use case there is likely a solution that wouldn't open the door for the privacy-destroying tracking that we don't want.
As far as SPAs go, without cookies SPAs could still have issues. User author tokens can be stored in local storage and included with all API requests, but that has its own security issues.
What is it about modern cookie implementations that make them more easily abused than whatever solution might be able to replace the current widespread usage of cookies for i.e., authorization and user settings?
User settings that live client-side only wouldn't be a problem.
The challenge of cookies is how generic they are. Cookies can be used to store almost anything a server wants to store.
Authorization is an interesting challenge without cookies, but I do expect it could be solved in a way that is specific to supporting authorization without adding back a general key/value store.
> The challenge of cookies is how generic they are. Cookies can be used to store almost anything a server wants to store.
That's not a challenge. That's a benefit.
Anyway you didn't actually answer my question, so allow me: the answer is nothing. There is nothing about cookies that enable them to be abused more than any system that could take their place. Which is to say, the issue here isn't the technology, so a technical solution likely won't work without neutering the entire point of cookies.
The idea of 'removing cookies entirely' over just making it illegal to collect and share private information is... a bit crazy.
Reading the comment section, I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing by trying to look for ways to add <<ads>> into the browser.
And I am curious, is anybody aware of a good alternative browser or even just an alternative way to what Mozilla should be doing instead?
I use brave mostly but I am not sure if their ad blocking is any good under the hood or not... Seeing a company like Mozilla behaving like this, I honestly don't know who or what to trust anymore...
Servo is being worked on as an alternative (after Mozilla excised it in one of the dumbest decisions they could've done), with the devs recently starting work on adding browser chrome, but it'll probably take years before it can be considered to be a useful alternative.
For now your best bet is probably to use a Firefox fork (Icecat will probably not shit the bed, but there's many other forks although a good chunk of them also modify the source code in ways that might not be desirable to casual browser users since they started usually with the goal to privacy harden Firefox and privacy focused forks have a bad habit of disabling features you probably do want enabled) or a user.js for Firefox to turn off undesirable features, at least until the situation becomes truly unusable; not sure what the best choice is after that because none of the Firefox forks have the manpower to step up and become a new main browser.
Ad blocking works quite well in Brave and in Firefox with (ubo). Any other browser is just an almost carbon copy of one of those two methods. Are you seeing something that I’m not? I really don’t see 99% of the ads that would without ad blocking in browser. Also Mozilla is fine and most of us nerds freak out when they try something new like this.
>I am really happy and uplifted that people expose Mozilla's wrongdoing
I remember up until around 10 to 15 years ago when Mozilla enjoyed seemingly limitless good will from basically anyone who had anything to do with computers.
Now they're arguably more reviled than even Big Tech, and rightfully so especially since they're deceiving about it.
They have some good stuff like offline page translation.
But most importantly they have a good review process for popular browser extensions. Google controls Chrome store, and they have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
So for daily browsing locked down Firefox. For banking and office stuff vanilla Chrome.
> they have a good review process for popular browser extensions... [Google] have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
It's serendipitous you mentioned that extension, because Mozilla recently came under fire after its treatment of that developer[1], and people started talking about how tedious it is to publish extensions. Mozilla is now also an ad company, so it has the same conflict of interest as Google.
I see that conflict as a sign this process actually works. That extension had a few thousands of downloads, and should not get automatic pass, just because it is from famous developer.
Ublick Origin is different from "Ublock Origin Lite"
All Chromium and Firefox-based browsers are tainted by association. The most promising options are Ladybrid, forked from the SerenityOS browser, but it's a long wait to 2026, and Servo-based browsers like Verso:
It all comes down to web engines. There are many browsers built on top of Chromium and a few that use Gecko or WebKit. Some of these try to make as few changes to the underlying engine as possible to ease the engine upgrades in their codebases, and due to the nature of the web they have to keep updating their engines.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
On top of uBlock origin, I can also recommend plugins to remove tracking elements from the URL, remove cookies, and running an own unbound + adblock (or similar).
Sadly then this becomes hard to maintain for non-IT people (i.e. the majority).
Then maybe Firefox can start shipping with defaults that don’t phone home to Mozilla several times when launching and closing? Mozilla harps on this privacy angle but I see it as purely marketing.
If someone in the EU sues Mozilla they will be forced to. The default shipping telemetry to Mozilla can't be legal, that has to be opt-in.
The management at Mozilla is about to do what I predicted a while back: They'll pivot to become an advertising company. Firefox is no longer the main product, it exists only to support the emerging ad business.
Spoken like someone who does not have to make a choice between groceries or gassing up the car.
Credit cards are predatory toward low-income individuals on purpose. When my vehicle needed $3000USD in repairs a few years ago, I did not have that money just laying around, so it went on the credit card. It would have taken me one month to pay that off if I did not also need to pay a mortgage, utility bills, student loans, groceries, and medical bills, on top of minor daily expenses people like you seem to forget exists when they want to punch down at someone less fortunate than them. When you already have nearly every dollar you make ear-marked, that "6 months interest free" crap might as well be a fart in the wind.
So, cc's are doing exactly what they are supposed to do; keep us in a position of minimum payments because emergency high-dollar expenses will, inevitably, happen if you are a living human not fortunate enough to have been birthed in a higher tax bracket.
I mean, I'm in the 12% tax bracket and handling my credit cards just fine. Then again, I'm also accumulating some savings and not spending my entire paycheck let alone beyond my means.
If you are paying interest on credit cards, that means either of two things:
A) You're one of the unluckiest men in the world having one shit thrown at you after another. I sympathize and hope you can get that balance paid off soon.
B) You're terrible with money and can't budget nor save to save your own life. I don't sympathize, but I will encourage you to learn how to budget and grow the necessary maturity to cut down expenses you don't truly need and can't afford.
Also, banks hate credit card holders carrying balances. Banks make their money off merchant and transaction fees, not interest payments; they very much prefer card holders who pay their statement balance in full every time.
Maybe my choice of words was insufficient, my apologies.
What I mean is making money off of interest is not their first choice. Interest money is not guaranteed, there is no collateral securing that debt. If the debtor (card holder) can't or doesn't pay up, the bank lost that money.
Banks prefer making money off of fees which are guaranteed revenue, and they strongly incentivize card holders to not carry balances over by waiving interest if statement balances are paid in full every time.
You're certainly wasting everyone else's time, you don't even know why credit cards have interest rates as high as they do. (No, it's not to prey on low income people.)
Mozilla's level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts, and their ongoing demise is an actual tragedy.
You're still tracking people, you just do it in a roundabout way that may preserve privacy on a technicality, and even that much is questionable. Even if this goal was achieved, it would only alleviate a small part of what is a fundamentally broken industry.
Claiming to promote a healthy web is just preposterous. Commercialization of the web through ads combined with the force multiplier that are garbage-generating LLMs, is thrashing the web and destroying its legacy at an unprecedented rate.
> We can’t just ignore online advertising - it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded
Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there. So everything that follows is compromised.
Advertising has been made a major driver, actually the only driver. It does not need to be a major driver and certainly not the only driver. And, spoiler alert, it cannot continue being a major driver.
Yes, advertising is a big and varied business with at least one century of storied successes (and how exactly it is done can range from the outright immoral to various shades of ethical). But society and the economy is much, much bigger than advertising. They can easily fund (and do so continuously in a vast range of domains) the infrastructures they need to function properly.
The internet is not a platform for ads. Its the digital canvas on which pretty much all of current life unfolds and will do so even more in the future.
Some sort of digital advertising business will be happening in the market driven / consumerist societies that are the current form of socioeconomic organization. But it is parochial, backward looking and eventually a dead-end to continue ignoring the much more fundamental role of internet infrastructure.
If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.
The line you quote is present tense, not future tense.
In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is.
I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.
The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better".
Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of?
Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.
> but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in
It is their job to find alternate models, their glory and ongoing relevance if they do. Otherwise somebody else will do it sooner or later (the status-quo is untenable) but it would imply needless waste and a sad requiem for an organization that has been loved by many for a long time.
As they continue seeking "...a balance between commercial profit and public benefit" my 2 cents contribution is to (re)state the obvious: the adtech billions are only a tiny part of the commercial world, let alone the public interest at large.
Even if ads must be improved for some reason, I don't see why Mozilla can come up with a solution that is only marginally better than what Google and Facebook have proposed the same group as Mozilla (PATCG). And PPA was jointly developed with Facebook, a company that has a monopoly on advertisements on its own platform.
Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.
These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.
Micropayments have been tried through third party networks but they’ve never worked. Mental transaction costs is one explanation. People want “free” is probably the other.
Saying "people want free" strikes me as a warped view of the dynamic. It always seems presumptuous to me to think that people would be willing to pay to read what you have to say (or watch your video, etc.) merely because you said it. Most authors online aren't Socrates. Ads on the web are mostly on sites centered around idle distractions/entertainment. People pay exactly what that sort of "content" is worth: nothing.
People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.
It's the same for every other unliked aspect of life. Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
I am aware some parts of the World consider this observation to be a statement of socialist or communist support. It isn't meant to be.
Advertising is no different. There's a lot of money in the adtech business, and it drives and is driven by a large consumer economy. Most of the people working in it hate being advertised to (being "victims"), but are happy to make money from it (being "perpetrators"). Most of us don't get to make money from advertising, so are more likely to see it for the problems it imposes on us.
Morally there are huge differences, but logically you can see parallels in other disliked industries: arms dealing, modern slavery, enterprise IT sales...
The difference is that we are not talking about advertising as a sandboxed economic activity, but digital advertising on a common internet platform that is evolving into the only platform for practically everything that happens. Old style phone, radio, print communications are dissapearing in real time, everything is routed digitally over the internet.
Adtech with its "move fast and break things" morality conquered the internet hill, but it cannot defend that hill for much longer. Integrating vital functionalities for the digital economy (identity, payments, exchange of sensitive data etc.) cannot all be driven and controlled by adtech interests and designs. The dog is much, much bigger than the tail.
If Mozilla cannot help precipitate the new normal it should at least make sure it has ongoing relevance when the inevitable happens.
So this is a big problem then. Potentially insurmountable. There are in fact people then that want a privacy-invading ad-soaked shit internet and profit wildly from it. These people have outsized power and every incremental win leads to more power that results in more wins in a positive feedback loop.
Power comes from the people and can be taken away by the people. Modern surveillance and control technology will make this harder but ultimately the possibility revolution is always there.
> People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.
There's no reason why this is true. Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that. How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at, other than payments processors charging transaction fees?
> Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
Capitalism is the thing that's lifted more and more of the world out of poverty, so I don't see this being the case. People got wealthy by making and selling stuff other people need and want. That's fine. The key to lifting people out of poverty instead of starving millions of people to death in the name of equality is: inequality isn't important; the base level of poverty being raised is.
> Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that.
Except the "free" here is a lie because the advertisers pay for you and they are only going to do that when they can (on average) get their money back and more. There is no free lunch, just a lunch paid with the money you were robbed.
So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising".
The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper.
So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites.
Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.
> Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies.
For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc.
The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement.
I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.
That's true—there are still some places where such data can be used, even without targeted advertising.
However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now.
It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.
The generator of that reality distortion field is "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source. It's incredibly hard to find an alternative that people like anywhere near as much -- despite much effort.
As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others. It would be great if they can come up with a good alternative that will scale to the billions of people who want stuff and dislike exchanging money. That leaves attention and ... ?
Adtech dominance goes beyond "stuff you don't pay". Plenty of non-commercial entities did and published stuff for free on the internet before ad money became dominant. For instance, the first forums I socialized on were all individual-owned or association-owned, and so were the webgames I played.
However, these entities became marginalized quickly through the creation of walled gardens, Google search discrimination pushing non-commercial websites out of the internet, and ad companies sabotaging open standards (e.g. RSS) and comitees (anyone hears about W3C these days?).
> As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others.
The analogy doesn't really work, because ad-tech is the reason other systems get stiffled. Democracies wouldn't look so good if their politicians got assassinated by neighbouring dictators whenever they feel like it.
The crux of the question is "how people find internet resources". And the answer is that, generally, ad-driven companies have no interest in showing their users this kind of stuff, and have taken over pretty much every entrypoint.
For instance, if I was to build a webgame, there is zero chance it could be found through Google nowadays. If I made an app, I would have to plead with Google's or Apple's store.
I could share it on e.g. Reddit, Twitter or FB, but that would be a tiny trickle of users, and the odds of them staying on my platform and its associated forums would be extrelemy low, because the users aren't actually looking for it when they see it.
Also it wouldn't be large enough to be their daily doomscrolling experience (and there is zero chance it could be integrated to it using e.g. RSS feeds). On top of that, any site not algorithmically optimizing content shown for maximum addiction would not capture users in the long run.
Guess what option I have left to show my thing to people? Pay the ad-tech business. That's not something easy for an association or an individual who aren't looking to create revenue streams.
Okay, so what's your solution? People don't use search engines because they have ads; they use them for another reason. Can you compete with that reason?
Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want.
I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
If you're correct, and I fear that you are, then that means there's no room on the web for people like me. Which, I guess, has already been made really clear over the last couple of years.
I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.
> If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.
Nobody is going to escape the adtech blackhole before the US govt. actually does its job and does to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and a few others what it did to Standard Oil or AT&T.
We're talking about entities so tentacular and rich that they can (and did) run whatever service you provide for free for decades, just to kill you and gain control. No legitimate business can resist that.
I don't like ads either, but what is the alternative? Since content costs money to produce and host, there must be a revenue source somewhere. Is the solution paywalls?
Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.
I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised.
Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.
The world simply does not need profit-motivated online content. The internet can be a place for physical business to interact with customers and individuals/groups to share their ideas and art. None of that requires ad funding. The only thing that does require advertising for revenue (and is of any value) is reporting work, and they're struggling in the current model anyway. What great conveniences are you worried about losing? Social media sites? Forums existed without any funding but donations. Maps? OSM and Apple Maps exist. YouTube? Free video hosting is more expensive to operate than other media, but I'd bet nerds would rig up some near-seamless webtorrent protocol for embedding and sharing video with distributed load. The people making YouTube/online content? They're mostly fan-supported via patron relationships anyway. If advertising were banned overnight there would be maybe a month of readjustments, a few tech companies would have to pivot, and then life would go on but be a bit less shitty.
> Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.
It does! But that can be achieved with contextual advertising rather than advertising that relies on spying on everybody.
Also, I don't think that Mozilla's proposal eliminates the tracking and surveillance. It just makes the browser itself the one doing the tracking and surveillance.
How much of the "content" (what a disgustingly dystopian word to describe people's creative output) that you "consume" (ugh again) only today is paid and how much is already made for free and just hosted on platforms that profit from it?
> I'd love for their to be another driver
There is. Humans are literally driven by their creative urges.
The free and open internet is damn close to being on the
very last leg of its stay at the ICU and there is little
reason to expect a recovery.
It us all hugely centralized, stuffed with ad inside ads,
and propaganda inside propaganda like a matryoshka doll.
With monetization as the main driving force.
Perhaps the ever-present dream of becoming famous. (and rich)
Those giants abuse their position to kill off what little
remains.
For many the web is "YouTube,Tiktok,Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Telegram etc"
Email as moved to centralized for the most part.
IRC have moved on to centralized silos for the most part
Usenet has largely moved on.
finger has moved on.
Note you can still run these tools on your own if you want.
It is getting progressivly harder.
I have given up running my own mail server, since the "big silos"
have a strong tendency to reject emails from small servers.
- none of them matters, if your browser does not support features, like DRM, because firefox ships with these features
- it is hard to browse the web without a niche browser, as some sites do not work
- most popular Linux OS'es ship with firefox. I think this will not change any time soon. For the situation to change something more ground breaking should happen. Until then we are barking at the moon
- I use more RSS reader nowadays, so browsers important (but not as much, for surfing). My reader shows YT videos in iframe, etc, etc
> However, I can imagine a world where advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance. That’s a world I want to help build.
How? Anything commercial is designed to make money and a business doesn't solely exist for the person. You can't wholly align public interests with commercial, it's just not possible.
Keep dreaming there Mark, there is no respect in advertising. With advertising your always forcibly exploiting someone to force something.
Says the organization which doesn't accept personal donations to fund Mozilla, and which doesn't seek government grants, like 'digital sovereignty' grants the EU might give to keep its citizens out of Sauron's dark eye.
You should be able to connect to your government's websites without being required to use a browser which is deliberately built to engage in advertising and which tracks you without real and effective informed consent.
Mozilla is saying that user-tracking is the only viable advertising model for any future web, and that even laws mandating only contextual advertising, with actual informed consent for anything else, is not something to consider.
I wanted to be able to tell my local schools to install Firefox instead of Chrome, because otherwise you are teaching the kids to depend and trust in Google. I cannot do that now, because I don't now trust in Firefox, which means placing my trust in one of the Firefox forks - and there's no way I can convince the schools to do that.
> And we’ll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy
That's exactly the chicanery I've come to expect from Firefox. I'm okay with advertisers which don't build up a tracking profile. For the ones that do - fuck them and drain their bank accounts.
Advertising and a free & open internet are antithetical. Look at how much social media, YouTube, ADL etc. are all collaborating on how to curtail free speech because of and on behalf of advertisers.
Yeah, fuck off, Mozilla. I don't want ads and will not see ads. I don't care if all the content that requires money goes away. In fact, I would prefer it.
You fucked up big time when you opted me into your "virginity preserving sex" without my consent. You should have written missives like this before pushing that option and EXPLAINED how it's preserving privacy.
lol, that’s rich coming from Mozilla. In fact, every Big Tech currently marketing “privacy” (including Apple) means something else. It’s just a buzzword now, like crypto used to be about encryption.
Mozilla, put the consumers first. Ad performance tracking must only involve the websites and the ad providers. The users, respectively the user agent must be left out of it.
"thieves are breaking car windows to steal. so we at Mozilla car company, who believe in drivers taking back the road, will move the glove box to be accessible from the outside, because we believe our cars can coexist in roads filled with thieves, who used to pay our bills until last month btw."
You need to be completely out-of-your-mind if you think that commenters of this site ousted Mozilla's CEO (after 5 years). And even more madness coming after, blaming HNers for an even worse CEO. There is no guideline about entertaining crazy theories. What you said makes zero sense. The fact that nobody wants to engage on this silly comment of yours seriously tells more about you than us.
You both broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. Please don't do that in the future, and if you'd please avoid tit-for-tat spats in particular, we'd appreciate it.
If lying was outlawed, half of HN would be in jail, you can see absolute bullshit in comments on many front page posts.
> users/customers
Mozilla's customer was google, and now its advertisers. I am sure they are listening to them. What are the users gonna do, switch to chrome? Wait until ladybird becomes mature? The naïveté is riveting.
> So you are saying that the previous Mozilla's CEO was working there because of ideals, not the money? Making 7 million USD while the company you manage loses revenue is the stupidest idea of working for ideals I have ever heard of.
This is how the market works, if you have a position that people don't want to take you pay more money. At some point money becomes the main motivator - and ideology takes the backseat to monetizing the audience.
You both broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. Please don't do that in the future, and if you'd please avoid tit-for-tat spats in particular, we'd appreciate it.
edit: Here's a few other threads on the same topic (of Mozilla's advocacy of a "privacy-preserving attribution", or "interoperable private attribution", of browser ads):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 ("Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature (noyb.eu)"; 14 days ago, 130 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 ("A word about private attribution in Firefox (reddit.com)"; 85 days ago, 102 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 (""Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" (mastodon.social)"; 87 days ago, 187 comments)