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.
