Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

I would love to give Firefox money, as long as they slash their CEO's ridiculous salary

Also, if firefox does better it'll forward the benefits of a better browser with more usage, more funding, faster features, and more on to the forks for those who want to use them. There is basically no downside for librewolf users here and its to their benefit to encourage for normie's to use firefox anyway

Getting angry at Mozilla for finding a way to survive by trying to offer something less evil won't solve the privacy problem in advertising. That has to be solved at the government level, and if anything, what Mozilla is working towards here is probably the best case scenario for a legislated solution in the US's economy.

To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

The web today has no privacy or openness. It has gmail accounts, russian propaganda bots, and AI SEO article spam. Does it matter which rose tinted browser you care to view or interact with this shit through? I'm approaching 40 and the web has been a fundamental part of my life to the point that I am sometimes bewildered about what I'd do without it. It is a sinking ship though, and at this point I'm much more interested in seeing alternatives to HTTP rather than trying to save the mess we built on-top of it.

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: "don't worry, no personalized data is retained." So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there's a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like "people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers". Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You're still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don't think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It's the model itself, it's the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don't know that there's a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

Non targeted advertising isn't as profitable. (It lacks dark patterns)

For what its worth I still watch over the air TV

Yes, they actually CAN know those things.

Thats a good point, those ads are far less profitable though, and as a result if mozilla offered that kind of service nobody would use it

Yes they have known these things for decades

Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?

Collecting as much data as possible is a means to an end. It's not valuable in and on itself.

Isn’t that exactly what brave did? I wasn’t a fan of their “watch ads to get BAT” system either, but the alternative was always to just buy BAT with actual money. I’d rather see Mozilla work with brave to collaborate and improve on the BAT strategy than to start another competing standard, personally.

that's actually the first good idea ive seen somebody suggest mozilla do instead!

For the moment you can donate to sites you like while keeping the adblocker on.

Sure, you can see it like that.

Doesn't change the reality. Sarcasm doesn't pay bills and personel costs, and hence most websites directly or indirectly rely on advertising. As does most other content like podcasts or videos.

We can either keep being delusional and pretend we can magically revolutionize the whole internet and much of the business around it, or we can be a bit more realistic and try some reforms, like less privacy-intrusive advertising and analysis.

Which do you think has a better chance to actually improve the actual privacy for users? Hrm?

They should find other ways to make money. There are so many different ways they could create value.

Also I'm not convinced that Mozilla would make much off of ads anyway as the ad space is very competitive

Refreshing.

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

My guy.... you linked to a youtube documentary about the questionable economics of gold and a blog post about an unreliable certification group associated with Rainforest Alliance. Not because of anything specific to gold or certifications, but... to illustrate the general idea that corporations can be bad?

The level of generality you have to zoom out to, to associate those to Mozilla, is the same level of zooming out typically used for Qanon conspiracy theorizing.

This is exactly the kind of thing that people make fun of with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If you're willing to zoom out to six degrees, you can connect Kevin Bacon to anyone in the history of cinema. It doesn't prove that Kevin Bacon is personally connected to everyone in the history of cinema, but what it does prove is the frivolousness of reasoning from such stretched out connections. That goes for historical connections, but also funding connections, and, perhaps most importantly here, for conceptual connections. And I would venture that trains of thought hinging on such remote connections are a hallmark of fuzzy thinking, which is why it's terrible to go from "Rainforest Alliance bad" to "... and therefore Mozilla ad privacy is bad."

That's not to say one shouldn't be concerned about Mozilla's venture into advertising, but that this is a terribly incoherent way of showing it, that's as liable to produce overextended false positives connecting anything to anything as it is to produce any insight.

For what's its worth I agree with the hexbear user

Brother. Mozilla is the only browser company letting you keep those things, so you're not "moving" anywhere. And every feature they've announced is not targeted at you; your (and my) customized setup where we never see an ad and leave minimal trace is still fully supported. The PPA is designed to improve the state of Web advertising as a whole, and improve the situation for the normal user who is basically leaving a rich personal history on every site they visit.

*Librewolf

Nice choice though. I personally would recommend the resist fingerprinting toggle extension as well

Same here. I've tolerated enough, and now it's enough. At the same time, I'm keeping my 👀 on Ladybird and Servo development.

And I love how they keep pushing the "ensure creators get paid for their work" as if they're doing the lord's work paying small-time YouTubers and PodCasters when, in reality, it's corporations getting the money. Who are these "creators" you're talking about, Mozilla?

They should create a way to pay websites and creators

There's actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive... But they don't have any policies regarding privacy invasion.

They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.

They also have eight members, via their other name "eyeo", on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).

Mozilla gets millions in donations, but they give millions to their CEO and millions to political activists. Had Mozilla demonstrated they couldn't survive on donations alone I (and presumably others) would be a little more forgiving. But right, from my perspective, it looks like the board is using the Mozilla coffers as their personal piggy bank instead of making a good faith effort to do anything that would allow them to survive without enshittifying.

You are assuming advertisers want something that is user focused. I don't think this is going to be that successful as targeted ads need lots of user data.

Also they only make money if you click on an ad. How often are you doing that? Spoiler: you shouldn't

What I wish they would do is create a way I could compensate websites from the browser. I want a monthly subscription that donates a small amount to all the websites I visit.

People are pissed that firefox depends on google's money, and theyre also pissed when they try to make their own money.