Firefox added ad tracking and has already turned it on without asking you

Can we please stop linking mastodon threads? Mozilla literally has an explainer article. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

It's pretty painful how quickly wrong information spreads. I'm sure it's not intentional, but that doesn't really make it better...

Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

Right riiight

I'd rather not have ads at all and just pay $5 a month and have all the websites I visit get a portion of that $5. Some people tried this years ago, but the payment infrastructure wasn't ready for it. Nostr can do it now though, their users "zapped" (tipped) nearly 1M USD (950k) over the past two months alone to content creators on their platform (twitter clone). And there's a feature to automatically split a set donation among all the posts you've liked. No reason that can't be done for the entire web. All instant, all with incredibly low fees, all payments made directly from you to the site you visited, no middlemen having to manage custody risk.

Browser extension tracks what sites I visit and then at the end of the month send them all tips. Sites could detect such an extension and automatically not show ads if you have it installed.

wouldn't you rather see ads that at least somewhat match your interests

No, that means they're tracking me.

if they use a technique that moves some of the attribution logic that used to run on third-party servers to instead be done in your web browser?

The more of my data that stays on my system, the better. I'm not against ads or necessarily relevant ads, I'm against tracking.

Wouldn't you want to use a system that involves less tracking?

Yes. I'm willing to disable my ad blocker if they don't track me. If the browser places the ads and the only data that leaves my machine is deanonymized and can't reasonably be used to identify me, that's enough.

However, I'd much prefer to just pay whatever the revenue from the ads I see is. Unfortunately, most services are either $5-10/month to remove ads, and there's no way they make that much from me (it's probably <$1/month, if not per year). I wish Firefox would do something like GNU Taler where I can load up a fund and websites take a faction of a cent for each page view or something.