Smells like there's BIG enshittification ahead...
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Servo cannot come soon enough. And yet... it's so far from being even close to ready for real usage.
I, for one, do not welcome any form of advertising.
I've been using Firefox since the beginning, before that Mozilla, and before that Netscape Navigator.
But I think it's finally time to switch to Librewolf.
I don't want digital advertising of any kind, even if my privacy is "preserved" through fancy data-laundering.
They could just use non-personalized ads instead tbh. They do need to earn some money after all
Bla bla bla …… advertising … bla bla bla For me advertising = Block
Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You've got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it's time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla's bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it's not adware.
While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system, web browser…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer.
The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
And this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be cluttered with ads. You could still pay a bit to remove them.
Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?
There are radio stations, financed through ads. And they check if people are listening by calling random persons to ask them what station they are listening to.
So this is a viable business model and nobody is stopping anybody from putting plain pictures and links on sites and just estimate the page visits, but online advertisers want to know more. They always want more.
At the same time, a browser is the essential software to browse the web. So this is as if your TV was like:
Yo, many people mute their TV during commercials and don't pay attention, which kills the poor networks. So I made a deal with advertisers and will check what your doing, while I provide unmutable ads , but don't worry, your privacy is very important to us and we only care about providing to you the best TV experience possible.
So do i understand it correctly, that ads are ok for you, but not targeted ads, because the advertisers always want to know more? Then that seems to be what mozilla is trying to achieve here: to limit what advertisers can know about you.
The technology for targeted ads are already in place, this could be an alternative that preserves more privacy than current ad networks.
Data anonymization is a good thing. If websites start using this solution instead of Google ads that'd be quite good. Well better than Google at least. But people seem to be afraid of ads getting added into Firefox. If it happens it will be a ticking bomb because the hunger for data and profit will rise every day.
for anybody that wants to disable it, go to the settings and search for "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement"
(or through the dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled flag in about:config)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
I'm going to hope for the best and assume this has nothing to do with their browser. Mozilla has a lot of other products.