edit: Here's a few other threads on the same topic (of Mozilla's advocacy of a "privacy-preserving attribution", or "interoperable private attribution", of browser ads):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643991 ("Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature (noyb.eu)"; 14 days ago, 130 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971247 ("A word about private attribution in Firefox (reddit.com)"; 85 days ago, 102 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 (""Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" (mastodon.social)"; 87 days ago, 187 comments)
I don't know what changed for Mozilla, but this doesn't look like a way into the future.
Or maybe they want to go that way, but they then should release Firefox/Thunderbird from ambitions like these. These project had other goals than what Mozilla today espouses.
I agree.
> A simple legislative change
There's no such thing as a "simple legislative change" when big money and powerful companies are involved.
This reluctance of legislative forces should be remembered when they try to get power over social media or other platforms to "protect the kids".
"We started [being racist] because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-respecting, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can’t just ignore [being racist] — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in [being racist] over the past few years."
You don't fix a problem by becoming part of it. "Those who fight monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters".
You know, the websites where I was insulted and mistreated the most were also websites where memes were the funniest and advice the most effective. These are two sides of free speech; you can't have creativity and originality if you ban all posts that break certain culture's decorum.
Can you provide your opinion and some backing for it, rather than simply saying "if"?
If the existence of [the half-racist new organization] provides [political] impetus to [outlaw the fully racist KKK] then that's very good.
Can you please concretely say whether you support Mozilla's actual ad tracking, and your reasons? That's better than alleging something is true by repeating "if" over and over.
I would also appreciate if you did not keep repeating "if [baseless assertion]" over and over. It doesn't help move the conversation forward, and you might unintentionally be invoking the illusory truth effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
But even if such a thing existed (independent product review agencies are the closest I guess) and they reaped a significant fraction of the gains from trade there'd still be the question how those gains would then end up funding other free content.
That only would happen if Mozilla plan was to bring the ad revenue to the developers, not to Google (or themselves). There is no benefit to society to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars to Google, Facebook and the likes.
Of course in the real world we get more of a mexican standoff than enlightened tradepartners coming mutually beneficial agreements.
Websites could ship with advertising that mimics print ads - the same ad is shown to everyone and the ads are targeted based only on the overall content of the site and the general market that is likely to browse it.
Advertising can absolutely still exist online, targeting should simply not be possible. That would mean losing a ton of functionality online as well, but it can be done.
Get rid of cookies entirely and get rid of or at least minimize the number of headers that identify a browser and OS. Authentication would need to be handled differently for many sites, but that's a solvable problem.
Add it to the list of obvious examples where browser vendors are disingenuous. Saying they care about privacy while sending a long list of identifiable information is disingenuous at best.
it's already proved it is most cost effective and had higher sales conversion.
but there are other factors at play. and everyone wants data. the entire system works now by denying publishers of any advertisement revenue by demographic targeting and forcing them to be the data extractors since they are the ones luring users in.
Mozilla is also a victim of this. they had to implement all changes google ever asked of them, and now this is their meta allegiance pledge. expect meta to pick their tab soon.
For example the ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores advertising items that are on sale. They often inform me that some item I was already planning to buy, but at another store, is available for cheaper at their store.
I win by saving money on my groceries that week and they win be getting sales that they would have otherwise gone to a competing store. It's the competing store that loses.
User authorization is a very specific use case. Cookies are a generic solution, if we only care about that one use case there is likely a solution that wouldn't open the door for the privacy-destroying tracking that we don't want.
As far as SPAs go, without cookies SPAs could still have issues. User author tokens can be stored in local storage and included with all API requests, but that has its own security issues.
The challenge of cookies is how generic they are. Cookies can be used to store almost anything a server wants to store.
Authorization is an interesting challenge without cookies, but I do expect it could be solved in a way that is specific to supporting authorization without adding back a general key/value store.
That's not a challenge. That's a benefit.
Anyway you didn't actually answer my question, so allow me: the answer is nothing. There is nothing about cookies that enable them to be abused more than any system that could take their place. Which is to say, the issue here isn't the technology, so a technical solution likely won't work without neutering the entire point of cookies.
The idea of 'removing cookies entirely' over just making it illegal to collect and share private information is... a bit crazy.
For now your best bet is probably to use a Firefox fork (Icecat will probably not shit the bed, but there's many other forks although a good chunk of them also modify the source code in ways that might not be desirable to casual browser users since they started usually with the goal to privacy harden Firefox and privacy focused forks have a bad habit of disabling features you probably do want enabled) or a user.js for Firefox to turn off undesirable features, at least until the situation becomes truly unusable; not sure what the best choice is after that because none of the Firefox forks have the manpower to step up and become a new main browser.
They have some good stuff like offline page translation.
But most importantly they have a good review process for popular browser extensions. Google controls Chrome store, and they have conflict of interest when it comes to hosting stuff like Ublock.
So for daily browsing locked down Firefox. For banking and office stuff vanilla Chrome.
It's serendipitous you mentioned that extension, because Mozilla recently came under fire after its treatment of that developer[1], and people started talking about how tedious it is to publish extensions. Mozilla is now also an ad company, so it has the same conflict of interest as Google.
Ublick Origin is different from "Ublock Origin Lite"
I remember up until around 10 to 15 years ago when Mozilla enjoyed seemingly limitless good will from basically anyone who had anything to do with computers.
Now they're arguably more reviled than even Big Tech, and rightfully so especially since they're deceiving about it.
There are some Firefox forks that are OK, like librewolf and icecat.
So, a big question then is if Google, Apple, or Mozilla decide to change their engine in such a way that it would improve user tracking on the web how many of these custom browser companies and individuals (Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, Tor, folks, etc.) would be willing to undo those changes, or add code to mitigate the tracking? And then how many of them will keep migrating their patches from one version of the engine to the next? And how many of them will continue doing so when the engine maintainers will actively try to make this work harder? And how many investors will keep giving money to these browser companies?
The web is very vulnerable, and Mozilla with its board slowly leeching off all the resources out of it has long been loosing its ground for a long time. I'm afraid that we are at a point when the only way to preserve user privacy is via regulatory means. EU is clumsy, but at least they make the user tracking more annoying for advertisers, and some actors like Apple would be more hesitant to blatantly add ad supporting code to WebKit just to avoid further confrontations with the EU.
Sadly then this becomes hard to maintain for non-IT people (i.e. the majority).
Just nah. Public benefit and openness should come first. Commercial profit should be made around that. They should not balance each other.
The management at Mozilla is about to do what I predicted a while back: They'll pivot to become an advertising company. Firefox is no longer the main product, it exists only to support the emerging ad business.
Then again, we pay interest to credit card companies who regularly sell our data, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Sole exception given to spend done out of duress, that balance should be paid ASAP but you may be excused because something had to give.)
Credit cards are predatory toward low-income individuals on purpose. When my vehicle needed $3000USD in repairs a few years ago, I did not have that money just laying around, so it went on the credit card. It would have taken me one month to pay that off if I did not also need to pay a mortgage, utility bills, student loans, groceries, and medical bills, on top of minor daily expenses people like you seem to forget exists when they want to punch down at someone less fortunate than them. When you already have nearly every dollar you make ear-marked, that "6 months interest free" crap might as well be a fart in the wind.
So, cc's are doing exactly what they are supposed to do; keep us in a position of minimum payments because emergency high-dollar expenses will, inevitably, happen if you are a living human not fortunate enough to have been birthed in a higher tax bracket.
If you are paying interest on credit cards, that means either of two things:
A) You're one of the unluckiest men in the world having one shit thrown at you after another. I sympathize and hope you can get that balance paid off soon.
B) You're terrible with money and can't budget nor save to save your own life. I don't sympathize, but I will encourage you to learn how to budget and grow the necessary maturity to cut down expenses you don't truly need and can't afford.
Also, banks hate credit card holders carrying balances. Banks make their money off merchant and transaction fees, not interest payments; they very much prefer card holders who pay their statement balance in full every time.
What I mean is making money off of interest is not their first choice. Interest money is not guaranteed, there is no collateral securing that debt. If the debtor (card holder) can't or doesn't pay up, the bank lost that money.
Banks prefer making money off of fees which are guaranteed revenue, and they strongly incentivize card holders to not carry balances over by waiving interest if statement balances are paid in full every time.
You're still tracking people, you just do it in a roundabout way that may preserve privacy on a technicality, and even that much is questionable. Even if this goal was achieved, it would only alleviate a small part of what is a fundamentally broken industry.
Claiming to promote a healthy web is just preposterous. Commercialization of the web through ads combined with the force multiplier that are garbage-generating LLMs, is thrashing the web and destroying its legacy at an unprecedented rate.
Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there. So everything that follows is compromised.
Advertising has been made a major driver, actually the only driver. It does not need to be a major driver and certainly not the only driver. And, spoiler alert, it cannot continue being a major driver.
Yes, advertising is a big and varied business with at least one century of storied successes (and how exactly it is done can range from the outright immoral to various shades of ethical). But society and the economy is much, much bigger than advertising. They can easily fund (and do so continuously in a vast range of domains) the infrastructures they need to function properly.
The internet is not a platform for ads. Its the digital canvas on which pretty much all of current life unfolds and will do so even more in the future.
Some sort of digital advertising business will be happening in the market driven / consumerist societies that are the current form of socioeconomic organization. But it is parochial, backward looking and eventually a dead-end to continue ignoring the much more fundamental role of internet infrastructure.
If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.
In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is.
I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.
The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better".
Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of?
Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.
It is their job to find alternate models, their glory and ongoing relevance if they do. Otherwise somebody else will do it sooner or later (the status-quo is untenable) but it would imply needless waste and a sad requiem for an organization that has been loved by many for a long time.
As they continue seeking "...a balance between commercial profit and public benefit" my 2 cents contribution is to (re)state the obvious: the adtech billions are only a tiny part of the commercial world, let alone the public interest at large.
Some people must want this, how else could it end up this way?
Never worked? Or weren't good enough (fast, trustworthy, easy, cheap) for the purpose? I don't think its an easy problem to solve.
It's the same for every other unliked aspect of life. Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
I am aware some parts of the World consider this observation to be a statement of socialist or communist support. It isn't meant to be.
Advertising is no different. There's a lot of money in the adtech business, and it drives and is driven by a large consumer economy. Most of the people working in it hate being advertised to (being "victims"), but are happy to make money from it (being "perpetrators"). Most of us don't get to make money from advertising, so are more likely to see it for the problems it imposes on us.
Morally there are huge differences, but logically you can see parallels in other disliked industries: arms dealing, modern slavery, enterprise IT sales...
Adtech with its "move fast and break things" morality conquered the internet hill, but it cannot defend that hill for much longer. Integrating vital functionalities for the digital economy (identity, payments, exchange of sensitive data etc.) cannot all be driven and controlled by adtech interests and designs. The dog is much, much bigger than the tail.
If Mozilla cannot help precipitate the new normal it should at least make sure it has ongoing relevance when the inevitable happens.
How can this be stopped?
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
Power comes from the people and can be taken away by the people. Modern surveillance and control technology will make this harder but ultimately the possibility revolution is always there.
There's no reason why this is true. Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that. How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at, other than payments processors charging transaction fees?
> Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
Capitalism is the thing that's lifted more and more of the world out of poverty, so I don't see this being the case. People got wealthy by making and selling stuff other people need and want. That's fine. The key to lifting people out of poverty instead of starving millions of people to death in the name of equality is: inequality isn't important; the base level of poverty being raised is.
Advertising seriously increases that friction.
> How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at
Nobody, but that's not the alternative. That's not how it worked before advertising came in and degraded the web.
Except the "free" here is a lie because the advertisers pay for you and they are only going to do that when they can (on average) get their money back and more. There is no free lunch, just a lunch paid with the money you were robbed.
The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper.
So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites.
Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies.
For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc.
The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement.
I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.
However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now.
It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.
As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others. It would be great if they can come up with a good alternative that will scale to the billions of people who want stuff and dislike exchanging money. That leaves attention and ... ?
However, these entities became marginalized quickly through the creation of walled gardens, Google search discrimination pushing non-commercial websites out of the internet, and ad companies sabotaging open standards (e.g. RSS) and comitees (anyone hears about W3C these days?).
> As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others.
The analogy doesn't really work, because ad-tech is the reason other systems get stiffled. Democracies wouldn't look so good if their politicians got assassinated by neighbouring dictators whenever they feel like it.
You can still make these. Why do people choose platforms with ads on over these things you remember, do you think?
For instance, if I was to build a webgame, there is zero chance it could be found through Google nowadays. If I made an app, I would have to plead with Google's or Apple's store.
I could share it on e.g. Reddit, Twitter or FB, but that would be a tiny trickle of users, and the odds of them staying on my platform and its associated forums would be extrelemy low, because the users aren't actually looking for it when they see it.
Also it wouldn't be large enough to be their daily doomscrolling experience (and there is zero chance it could be integrated to it using e.g. RSS feeds). On top of that, any site not algorithmically optimizing content shown for maximum addiction would not capture users in the long run.
Guess what option I have left to show my thing to people? Pay the ad-tech business. That's not something easy for an association or an individual who aren't looking to create revenue streams.
Indeed, and this is something we didn't know before the "move fast and break things" phase but now we do, also the side-effects.
But my argument is that the stuff we get with money changing hands dwarfs the novelty of "freebies-for-data" by orders or magnitude.
And for that broader economy to properly integrate into the digital age its just not possible to keep basing the internet infrastructure on adtech.
I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.
Nobody is going to escape the adtech blackhole before the US govt. actually does its job and does to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and a few others what it did to Standard Oil or AT&T.
We're talking about entities so tentacular and rich that they can (and did) run whatever service you provide for free for decades, just to kill you and gain control. No legitimate business can resist that.
Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.
I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised.
Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.
It does! But that can be achieved with contextual advertising rather than advertising that relies on spying on everybody.
Also, I don't think that Mozilla's proposal eliminates the tracking and surveillance. It just makes the browser itself the one doing the tracking and surveillance.
> I'd love for their to be another driver
There is. Humans are literally driven by their creative urges.
It us all hugely centralized, stuffed with ad inside ads, and propaganda inside propaganda like a matryoshka doll. With monetization as the main driving force. Perhaps the ever-present dream of becoming famous. (and rich)
Those giants abuse their position to kill off what little remains.
For many the web is "YouTube,Tiktok,Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Telegram etc"
Note you can still run these tools on your own if you want. It is getting progressivly harder.
I have given up running my own mail server, since the "big silos" have a strong tendency to reject emails from small servers.
- none of them matters, if your browser does not support features, like DRM, because firefox ships with these features
- it is hard to browse the web without a niche browser, as some sites do not work
- most popular Linux OS'es ship with firefox. I think this will not change any time soon. For the situation to change something more ground breaking should happen. Until then we are barking at the moon
- I use more RSS reader nowadays, so browsers important (but not as much, for surfing). My reader shows YT videos in iframe, etc, etc
How? Anything commercial is designed to make money and a business doesn't solely exist for the person. You can't wholly align public interests with commercial, it's just not possible.
Keep dreaming there Mark, there is no respect in advertising. With advertising your always forcibly exploiting someone to force something.
You should be able to connect to your government's websites without being required to use a browser which is deliberately built to engage in advertising and which tracks you without real and effective informed consent.
Mozilla is saying that user-tracking is the only viable advertising model for any future web, and that even laws mandating only contextual advertising, with actual informed consent for anything else, is not something to consider.
I wanted to be able to tell my local schools to install Firefox instead of Chrome, because otherwise you are teaching the kids to depend and trust in Google. I cannot do that now, because I don't now trust in Firefox, which means placing my trust in one of the Firefox forks - and there's no way I can convince the schools to do that.
> And we’ll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy
That's exactly the chicanery I've come to expect from Firefox. I'm okay with advertisers which don't build up a tracking profile. For the ones that do - fuck them and drain their bank accounts.
There's nothing wrong with sites that embed the same ad for everyone, much like you would do for print advertising.
The internet was much better when most websites were not profit driven.
From Brad Smallwood of anonym: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/anonym-technology-overv...
You fucked up big time when you opted me into your "virginity preserving sex" without my consent. You should have written missives like this before pushing that option and EXPLAINED how it's preserving privacy.
"thieves are breaking car windows to steal. so we at Mozilla car company, who believe in drivers taking back the road, will move the glove box to be accessible from the outside, because we believe our cars can coexist in roads filled with thieves, who used to pay our bills until last month btw."
