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in case anyone else tries this: you canNOT search "advertising" in the preferences to find it, since firefox only searches for setting names, not categories, and the setting name uses the phrase ad measurement not advertising
it seems perhaps a little naïve to categorize the entire business model of two tech giants, one of which fully controls the dominant browser, as in its death throes, contrasted with a thing a niche search engine most people have never hard of is doing as "fully workable"
i am pretty sure that is how Google got it's start too before the advent of modern ad networks
the reason targeted ads are everyone is not because they are so much better (they are often atrocious) but because they have been marketed to execs that buy the ads as better
they're hoping adtech bites, that adtech plays nice, that adtech notices the looming shadow of impending regulation in the US and goes "ok we'll be good".
I think one thing to note is that part of the motivation for this compromise is that having said compromise gives browser makers more leeway in cutting off existing methods of tracking or redesigning APIs that weren't designed with privacy in mind. It's less "please don't use the things you currently do to track users, please just be nice" and more "with this you will not need to bother participating in the adversarial fight we currently wage and we can fix the existing holes without any incentive for you to break them".
Thank you for taking the time writing this! Immediately disabled it.
Disclaimer up front: I work for ISRG, but on Let's Encrypt, not on DivviUp the project which implements privacy-preserving measurements.
How does turning this feature off help the web, or Firefox's users?
Suppose you don't run an ad blocker. Then having this feature off makes your experience obviously worse: the ads that could use this feature now can't, and instead invade your privacy more.
Suppose you do use an ad blocker. Then having this feature off makes no difference, as you correctly point out that an ad blocker prevents ads from even getting to the point of being able to use this feature.
So under what circumstances is it better to have turned this feature off?
i think the reason to turn it off is on the principal of being unwilling to participate in a web dominated by advertisers. the point is to make it clear that all effort paving the way for advertisers to continue their vice grip on the web in a potentially privacy-preserving manner would be better spent making structural changes to how the web is financed.
anyone who pays a subscription for a service like are.na, or uses the personal plan for a web product with a paid enterprise version, or buys music from artists (mostly) directly on Bandcamp already uses parts of the web that don't rely on advertiser support. I think disabling privacy-preserving ad measurement is one of many ways of steering companies able to make these kinds of necessary changes at scale away from furthering the power of advertisers. it's less about the immediate consequences of turning off the feature, and more about making sure we build a web where it isn't necessary in the first place.
that's personally why I turned it off, at least!
what good does leaving on intrusive advertising tech fo when we do not want intrusive advertising period? 🤔
thank you for making a post about this which is well researched and isn't just a knee-jerk reaction to hearing "advertising" and "new feature" in the same sentence.
personally, i'm more optimistic about the success chances of this, and i sympathize more with the "political gambit" aspect. to me it feels like Mozilla saying "hey. here's your stupid telemetrics. so now if you do your shady spying bullshit you don't have an excuse anymore and you're gonna get your balls sued off"
like, here's the thing. yes. blow up adtech forever die 1000 years all CEOs. yes, adtech industry deserves nothing. this solution that mozilla is proposing does not give adtech industries the fuck-all they deserve. it also does not cure male pattern baldness or release the batgirl movie. my point is i feel weird about having this neat system to protect people's privacy online getting tangled up in a discussion about what adtech industries deserve.
i feel weird about having this neat system to protect people's privacy online getting tangled up in a discussion about what adtech industries deserve.
Because it's not about protecting people's privacy online, it's about conceding to advertisers. "Huh buh but it's all anonymous" - there are entire think tanks dedicated to deanonymizing and deaggregating info.
And if this system is so good, so beneficial to the users, then surely they deserve to be asked if they want this feature on, no?
"it's not about protecting privacy online, it's about conceding to advertisers" do you have a source for that? from what i understand mozilla's intentions are pretty transparently that it's a political gambit to prevent tracking.
sorry but you're coming across as someone who heard "new advertising API" from mozilla and immediately made up their mind about what it was and how bad it was instead of giving mozilla (imo a respectable organization with a good track record of implementing pro-privacy and anti-tracking features, who has earned your benefit of the doubt) the benefit of the doubt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.
From Bobby Holley, the Firefox CTO.
a respectable organization with a good track record of implementing pro-privacy and anti-tracking features
They also have a history of:
P. S. And no, sorry, I'm not going to give them a benefit of the doubt on a feature that is directly implemented for the benefit of advertisers and enabled without my consent.
that's an ambiguous quote and intentionally or not, you're taking it out of context.
The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla. Our historical approach to this problem has been to ship browser-based anti-tracking features designed to thwart the most common surveillance techniques. We have a pretty good track record with this approach, but it has two inherent limitations.
First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. Second, this approach only helps the people that choose to use Firefox, and we want to improve privacy for everyone.
This second point gets to a deeper problem with the way that privacy discourse has unfolded, which is the focus on choice and consent. Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up.
Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.
at the very end of that post, you get this, too:
Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.
this is pretty clearly the guy saying what i and @nic-hartley are saying; it's a political gambit and the goal is anti-surveillance. you're presenting the quote in a way that makes it look like he's announcing "The Big New Partnership With Every Single Adtech Firm to Track You More".
"this has good intentions but it's not likely to work" is a perfectly reasonable opinion. "this is not about protecting privacy, it is about doing what adtech wants" is misinformation, and you're spreading it like misinformation.
i'm not convinced you're trying having a good faith and well informed discussion anymore. you bring up some good points, but what the fuck are you doing taking quotes out of context from reddit threads.
it's a political gambit and the goal is anti-surveillance. you're presenting the quote in a way that makes it look like he's announcing "The Big New Partnership With Every Single Adtech Firm to Track You More".
You're basically arguing interpretations. You think this is a political gambit with anti-tracking goals, fine. I think this is "if we throw our users' pinky finger to the advertisers, maybe they'll like us more".
