Technology

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!

Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry

No thanks, I’ll pass

I mean people freaking out about this don't actually understand what's happening and why Mozilla is doing it. Mozilla is trying to build a new privacy-based advertising. The feature needs to be opt-in by default in order to have a chance to become mainstream. Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is. Most people don't change default settings. So they can never get websites to try this better technology if their own users aren't adopting it.

I also hate the attitude of this community they think Firefox is built for them(ultra tech savy, extremely privacy concious) when 99% of their users are not these things. If you want ultra privacy, go use Libreawolf or whatever. Those solutions are for that type of person. Firefox and Mozilla builds for the average person, which is why they correctly say that the user won't understand the feature. (Anyone says otherwise is in a tech bubble and haven't seen normal people interacting with their computers).

Look, everything is going to disappoint us. Everything runs off a profit motive, and it turns out profit is immoral.

To disable:

user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);

From the article, quoting a Firefox dev explaining the decision:

@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption.

In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision.

puts on They Live glasses

@McCovican @jonny @mathew @RenewedRebecca If we had made it opt in, then not a single human being on the planet would have enabled it, and we didn’t want that

Explaination from the article:

The way it works is that individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggregation server (operated by Mozilla), then that server reports the aggregated data to an advertiser's server. The "advertising network" only receives aggregated data with differential privacy, but the aggregation server still knows the behavior of individual browsers!

Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.

So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?

So is it safe to assume that alternate builds of Firefox (Pale Moon et al) will be probably removing that "feature" ?

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.

Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?

Edit: I just did that

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.

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.

Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀

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.

Anyone see the option to turn it off on Android phones?