Firefox

And what is the advertising industry doing to earn back the trust that they've eroded with their incessant, relentless abuse over the entire life of the Internet?

Completely facile argument, right there in the last sentence.

We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.

YOU BUILT THE FUCKING THING. Just turn it off and go away. Tada, we now have something better: no privacy-violating data at all.

Who's forcing you to make advertisers happy? Don't answer that, because I don't care. You can't pretend to be about privacy and then build things that help advertisers violate it.

This one's also pretty funny btw:

If at some point they discover they’re doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place.

Advertisers don't give a shit. They have zero motivation to fix anonymization. They're not going to HELP us get rid of privacy violations.

Man alive, I thought that Mozilla had been doing their own Personal Package Archives so that we didn't have to deal with Ubuntu packaging it as a Snap anymore. And this is doubly disappointing.

This is the exact same story the whole internet has used and every time the 3rd party or whoever it is eventually gets corrupted and it turns out that they kept the original data. The company gets bought by Amazon or who google and repeat

This is bullshit. The total amount of advertising I want is zero. The total amount I want of tracking is zero. The total amount of experiments I want run on my data without consent is, guess, zero.

Mozilla: We want to offer anonymised data so advertiser stop trying to track you with shady means. You can opt ou tho.

Privacy ultras: WHY YOU WANT DATA?!

Mozilla: ...

The fact that mozilla does't understand what user consent is, is alarming about where they are heading.

The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox’s case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let’s Encrypt; does anybody think they’re not trustworthy?)

I wouldn't trust anyone with data this valuable, and even assuming they're trustworthy now, who knows if they'll be in a year; especially with how much "interest" they gain by now handling this data.

and aggregated and anonymized there.

I'm just supposed to believe and trust that they will do that?

Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party.

A "trusted third party" does not exist, and will never exist.

Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.

Or I can tell advertisers to eat shit and give them nothing, like I've been doing my whole life. Has been working well so far.

What the heck Mozilla? The people complaining are the ones who understand it. Anyone who thinks this is ok is either a die hard Mozilla fan or doesn't understand what it does. This is targeted advertising. You know how companies target vulnerable minorities? That's what this enables. It isn't just about "privacy" as targeted advertising is dark in many other ways.

I understand it perfectly fine thank you. This should not be a hidden opt-out option.

They keep saying many words waving hands frantically and people still don’t like it. I bet if they explain 10th time with colourful diagrams and 3 minute whiteboard explainer video people still won’t like it. Such an ungrateful crowd

You need hands on workshops, we will organise them with foundation budget. That will surely explain things sufficiently. We will also give out informational flyers in small communities to foster local enlightenment.

I'm not even buying the premise. Any business can look at its bottomline to see if their advertising works. If they can't, then its not working.

Why wouldn't you bring all this up before you shove it into the browser to be discovered later, and make it the default? Whoever thought this was a good idea should be shot with a ball of their own shit.

It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox's #PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it

The documentation under the "Learn more" link next to the "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" checkbox in Firefox preferences explains very clearly what it is and how it works. Asserting that people who read that and are indignant about it being enabled by default just... "don't actually understand" it is absurdly insulting and basically gaslighting.

What ever happened to micro transactions? Weren’t they supposed to be the way we compensated web producers? Instead we got ads.