9mo ago

Bas Schouten: "If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this." - Mastodon

Bas Schouten (@Schouten_B@mastodon.social)

Just wanted to surface this comment, because not enough people are cognizant of the fact that adblockers do their job and prevent any PPA submissions.

22 comments

Exactly. This helps the quiet majority, and the people who would turn it off are also those who would block ads anyway. So the majority gets a privacy bump, and those who hate ads get what they've always gotten.
I honestly don't see the issue here.
If Firefox blocked all ads by default, why would a website bother making any accomodations for Firefox? The number of "broken" websites would go up and Firefox users would get even more frustrated. If the quiet majority, who are okay with ads, leave because websites are broken, the rest of us are worse off.
On the flip side, if Firefox is able to broker a deal where privacy is respected so some of the privacy community disable ad-blockers (probably another quiet majority), that's a net win for advertisers because they're getting access to a demographic they otherwise wouldn't. Firefox could take a share of the profits as well, which provides another revenue stream apart from search, meaning Firefox is more independent.
I honestly don't see the issue with PPA. It sounds:
good for users - more privacy
good for advertisers - more people seeing ads
meh for anti-ads people - ad-blockers can still block these ads, or you can disable the feature
good for Firefox - privacy win + more revenue streams
That's exactly the thing Firefox should be doing, finding a way to increase privacy while making itself more independent from Google search revenue.
- It's not currently rolled out to any advertisers AFAIK, but when it does, I imagine it could become a significant revenue stream. So yes, hypothetical.
  I don't think this feature is harmful in any way. If you block ads, it won't impact you. If you don't, you'll either get the current type of ads or the more private ads, so it either does nothing or improves your privacy a bit. It sounds like a win-win to me, which is rare in privacy circles, with the only caveat being a theoretical issue from Mozilla technically having access to your metadata, which they technically already do since you're using their browser.

- Should be both that the ads don't get in and no ad related traffic gets out.
- Just like today, yes.

"Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. " But anti privacy features and user influencing features are. So what's the point here?
- I think they believe it's not anti-privacy, but a lesser of two evils.
  Mozilla/Firefox simply can't exist without ads. Google same thing. So why would they actively contribute to their own demise by declaring war on ads?
  Instead they chose a compromise that still allows ads but in a more responsible/private way. And you can still turn it off. Sure it should have been opt-in, but I think most people wouldn't use it then and we're back to the same problems.
- But it's a privacy feature? 🤷
  I mean sure, it's easy to read this and go immediate full-on "someone suggested another distroy than arch"-nuclear. But as someone else said, and what is essentially the linked post, this is a feature for those that do not run adblockers.
  If you run an adblocker, this feature does nothing for you. Whether on or off. It could not matter any less. You don't interact with ads, so there is no ad interaction to track.
  But if you don't run an adblocker - and let's be real here, that's going to be the vast majority of even Firefox users probably - then this is how advertising ought to work, so it's a privacy-enhancing feature. Yes, right now it doesn't do much. But were it opt-in, it could not do much. Not now, not ever.
- Tell me, what data does an advertiser know about me if I have enabled this feature? You can assume that I don't run any tracking protection, no ad blocker, and all telemetry enabled.

I just hope ad blockers don't simply stop working (and by extension, existing) simply because multiple websites have started blocking the blockers (looking at you, YouTube).
I guess for small independent websites that run ads, I sorr of understand why I need to disable ad blockers, but for a website like YouTube, owned by an advertising giga-company, that's just stupid.