jwz three months ago: Mozilla is an advertising company now

From the comments:

Preemptive subtwit.

Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

Mozilla has been financed by ads since 20 years. This pays the people working on the browser. 99% of the work is actually done by employees, not by volunteers. Acquiring that advertising company is the next logical step to get rid of Google (also financed by ads…) Instead of blaming shaming, we need to think about how to finance working on free software, as relying on unpaid work is not viable and brings issues with diversity.

You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”

Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text. That’s news. Literal news.

“Instead of blaming and shaming” – fuck that. I will absolutely and unapologetically blame them for the utter shame they bring on themselves.

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Mozilla has just bought into the narrative that the advertising industry has a right to track users by turning Firefox into an ad measurement tool. While Mozilla may have had good intentions, it is very unlikely that ‘privacy preserving attribution’ will replace cookies and other tracking tools. It is just a new, additional means of tracking users.”

Sigh… I cannot for the life of me figure how anyone could think that enabling PPA (even by default) means that advertising industry has somehow right to track folks. Like dude, the entire point of PPA is that advertisers could then get to know if/when their adverts are working without tracking people.

The argument that “It is just a new, additional means of tracking users” also doesn’t really make sense - even if we assume that this is new means of tracking. I mean, sure it technically is new addition, but it’s like infinity+1 is still infinity - it doesn’t make a difference. The magnitude of this one datapoint is about the same as addition of any new web api (I mean there are lots that shouldn’t exist - looking at you chromium… but that’s besides the point).

File a complaint over use of third-party cookies and actual tracking if you want to be useful - this complaint just makes you look like an idiot.

Good. Opt-out is authoritarian dogshit, and should be illegal.

Firefox should really embrace minimalism

Can someone TLDR this situation? Is this like 1/10th what Google does or is Firefox basically Chrome now?

I will copypaste, because this feature has been discussed a lot already.

The companies will get some general data if their ads work, without a profile about you being created. I am fine with that. Just imagine what a boon it would be for the “normal“ less tech savvy, if advertisers switched to a more privacy respecting technology like this. If more privacy focused people don’t like it, they can simply disable it by ticking one box, without negative consequences (unlike content blockers and similar techniques where a website can penalize you, turned off PPA is not detectable). It has no downsides as far as I am concerned. It doesn’t give advertisers additional data that they wouldn’t already be able to get, it just creates the option of measuring their ads in a privacy respecting way.

Discussion about PPA from some time ago